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Famed San Francisco-based startup accelerator and venture capital firm Y Combinator says that one AI model provider has overtaken OpenAI in popularity among the accelerator’s latest batch of startups, eliminating the ChatGPT-maker’s previous market dominance.
On a December 22 episode of official Y Combinator podcast Lightcone, YC general partner Diana Hu said that “shockingly,” Anthropic’s Claude AI models are the most popular among the accelerator’s new winter 2026 batch of startups, dethroning OpenAI.
“For the longest time, OpenAI was the clear winner,” said Hu, adding that when YC started the podcast in February 2024, OpenAI’s models were preferred by over 90 percent of that batch’s firms. Even in early 2025, added YC president and CEO Garry Tan, Anthropic’s models were only preferred by around one-fourth of new YC-backed startups.
But in the past three to six months, said Hu, usage of Anthropic’s Claude models among new YC firms skyrocketed to over 52 percent. Hu partially credited this fast takeoff to the rise of vibe-coding platforms, such as Replit and Lovable, which use Claude models to power software that enables people without coding experience to develop websites and applications through natural language. Several of the entrepreneurs in this latest YC batch are building their own code-generation companies to compete with the likes of Replit and Lovable.
Hu said that Anthropic has developed a reputation for providing top-line coding models, and as more startups enter the coding space, they are consistently relying on Claude. But while coding may bring entrepreneurs into the Anthropic ecosystem, that’s not how the “vast majority” of people are using Claude, YC managing partner Jared Friedman said.
“I wonder if there’s a bleed-through effect,” Friedman opined, “where people are using Claude for their personal coding and then as a result, they’re more likely to choose it for their application, even if their application is not doing coding at all.”
Tan postulated that once a user has spent enough time with a certain AI model, they become familiar and comfortable with that model’s “personality,” which makes it harder to switch. Hu agreed, and said that OpenAI’s models have “black cat energy,” while Anthropic’s have that of more of a “happy-go-lucky, very helpful golden retriever.”
Personally, Tan said he is still using ChatGPT as his daily AI tool, mainly because of the platform’s ability to remember details about users across multiple conversations. “It knows me, it knows my personality, it knows the things I think about,” Tan said, adding that memory, and the consumer experiences enabled by it, is fast-becoming a legitimate moat for OpenAI.
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Ben Sherry
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