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To Anthropic’s credit, it has been making inroads into the consumer market – with one of its fastest-growing segments being its “Max” subscription, priced at $200 per month. And Wong and Duverce both pointed to Claude’s coding capabilities as a differentiating advantage in the LLM landscape. Since its full launch in May 2025, Claude Code has already grown to over $500 million in run-rate revenue, with usage growing more than tenfold in just three months, according to Anthropic.

It’s still early days for AI technology, Giuseppe Sette, co-founder of AI startup Reflexivity, told me. There’s still no definitive winner among AI models, Sette believes, and Anthropic’s product performs very well in specializations such as coding.

But “the technological frontier is moving at a pace that we’ve absolutely never seen before,” Sette added. “Things are changing so fast that a burst of acceleration could put [Anthropic] at the forefront – or they could get left behind.”

-Christine Ji

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Being a dedicated sort, I tasted all 10 of these mustards straight from the jar. With watering eyes, pumping endorphins and overactive salivary glands, I licked each mustard off a spoon, then quickly cleansed my palate with plenty of milk and water to subdue the heat. But the sandwich I had at the end, with my new favourite mustard, was worth every fiery spoonful.

Mustard is intriguingly complex in flavour – powerful, umami, hot – yet easy to make. At its simplest, it is little more than fermented mustard seeds soaked in brine until viscous and bubbling. Sadly, however, many modern brands, especially the cheaper ones, see fit to include unnecessary additives, such as xanthan gum and wheat flour. And, rather predictably, the cheaper the mustard, the less actual mustard it tends to contain.

Much as with mayonnaise, many processed mustards contain spirit vinegar instead of more subtle acids, such as white-wine or cider vinegar. Spirit vinegar is harsh and sharp, dominates the overall flavour and can result in an unappealingly aerated, mousse-like texture. In fact, six of the mustards I tasted were so similar, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were all made in the same factory. They were essentially carbon copies of each other – sulphuric, sweet, hot and moussey – even if they did still bear the hallmark fieriness and complexity of a classic English mustard.

So, when looking for a mustard that’s worth your money, seek out those with real vinegar rather than spirit vinegar, and without emulsifiers or texturing agents such as wheat flour; they’re simply unnecessary. Or, better still, make your own: you can easily produce a year’s worth of mustard with just five minutes’ work.

The best supermarket English mustard

Best overall:
Stokes classic English mustard

By Christine Ji

Anthropic’s brand-awareness effort drew thousands as the company competes for consumer attention amid increasing competition

Claude’s pop-up at the Air Mail newsstand in New York drew over 5,000 people over the course of a weekend.

The line stretched for blocks down the street in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood. Hundreds of people stood in the heat of an unseasonably warm October weekend – not for a sample sale or celebrity sighting, but a pop-up hosted by the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic.

For seven days in early October, Anthropic’s large language model Claude was the brand-in-residence at the Air Mail newsstand, the physical outpost for the digital magazine founded by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

Like any good pop-up seeking to attract New Yorkers, Claude’s involved a variety of free merchandise: coffee cups, postcards, tote bags and matchbooks adorned with designs from Anthropic’s in-house illustrator; baseball caps embroidered with the word “thinking”; and copies of Chief Executive Dario Amodei’s essay, “Machines of Loving Grace,” wrapped in navy cloth and printed on locally sourced and 100% postconsumer recycled paper.

By the time I stepped into the brick storefront on the pop-up’s last day, the caps and essays were long gone, but the space was still crowded for a Tuesday afternoon.

Claude’s partnership with Air Mail was the physical manifestation of the company’s recent brand campaign called “Keep Thinking,” Sam McAllister, member of staff at Anthropic, told me. We sat on Air Mail’s back patio, surrounded by clusters of people reading, working on their laptops and talking among themselves. Claude is the AI “built to help people think through their hardest problems,” according to McAllister. “We don’t need to distract them with anything else.”

People now use AI to cheat on homework, generate low-quality social-media videos or get responses like “that’s exactly right!” to everything they input. In the increasingly commoditized world of LLMs, Anthropic seems to be positioning Claude as something different – a higher-brow AI tool that encourages users to think of problems that can be solved with more information, rather than as a way to outsource their own thinking.

It’s not a conventional AI campaign, as Claude’s predecessors in the Air Mail location include luxury names like Bottega Veneta and Ralph Lauren. And New York is not the easiest place to market an AI product – something the wearable AI startup Friend.com discovered when its recent subway advertisements were met with anti-AI vandalism.

“New York City is the capital of the world and therefore the top domino to go after in consumer marketing,” Friend.com CEO Avi Schiffman later told MarketWatch.

Wall Street currently views AI as primarily a consumer product and not a business application, according to Bryan Wong, portfolio manager at Osterweis Capital Management. In his opinion, enterprise adoption has been limited beyond areas of coding and customer support.

The path to large-scale profits from business applications will be “gradual,” said Jordan Klein, an analyst on the trading desk at Mizuho Securities. As a result, investors anticipate that most models will need to incorporate some form of ad placement to capitalize on the faster-growing consumer segment, Klein told me.

The major LLMs are trying to promote themselves widely to consumers, and branding has become an important part of the AI battle. Meta Platforms Inc. (META), OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL) (GOOG) Google Gemini have recently rolled out video-generation capabilities. Gemini shot to the top of Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) U.S. App Store last month after the launch of its image editor Nano Banana. Earlier this week, OpenAI’s short-form video app Sora reached 1 million downloads in less than five days.

More users and engagement leads to more advertising revenue – an important consideration for AI companies looking to fund the extremely expensive development of the technology, according to Klein.

OpenAI declined to comment for this article, while Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic – a four-year-old private startup that counts Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Google among its major investors – has doubled down on productivity with its latest model, adding the ability to generate PDFs, PowerPoints and Excel files. And it’s trying to take that message to consumers with a branding campaign that includes its Manhattan pop-up.

“We prioritize outputs like text, files, code and creative applications,” Anthropic’s McAllister told me. In an age where AI “slop” – a term used to refer to low-quality media that’s fast and easy to produce – proliferates on the internet and in real life, Claude aims to be the “antidote to that,” he added.

Also read: OpenAI wants to build a social-media business. Can its Sora app take on Meta and Google?

A ‘thinking space’

“I found out about this event yesterday,” Poorva Patel, a recent engineering graduate, told me at the pop-up. By 6 p.m. on Monday, she had hopped into her car and departed from her hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

“I was exhausted by midnight, but I was like, ‘I have to make it no matter what,'” Patel said.

After 10 hours of driving, she had arrived in New York on Tuesday morning and had spent the day meeting new people, exploring the Air Mail space and enjoying free tea and merchandise.

Later in the afternoon, another attendee, Sanam Ghaneeian, introduced herself to me and asked if I had experience “vibe coding.” (I don’t, but I suppose the point of AI tools is to allow anyone to code – even journalists.) A founder and marketing strategist, Ghaneeian had just moved to New York on Monday from Los Angeles to work on her startup. She had heard about the pop-up online and decided to stop by to do some work.

Ghaneeian rotates through a variety of AI tools in her everyday life, but she told me that Claude has been particularly “transformative” for her. “It’s allowed me to vibe-code websites, build custom dashboards and design entire visual systems in under 24 hours,” Ghaneeian said.

McAllister recounted his feeling of shock and “mild panic” upon seeing a line of over 100 people in front of the pop-up last Saturday, more than an hour before opening. The line only grew longer as the day went on. McAllister and his team handed out ice cream and demonstrated a gadget called Poetry Camera, which uses Claude to analyze photos and print a corresponding poem.

“We definitely didn’t order enough merchandise, that’s for sure,” he laughed.

McAllister and his team’s goal of creating a physical “thinking space” yielded over 5,000 visitors who came to the pop-up during the course of the weekend.

“I think Anthropic really cares about what its users want,” Patel told me. “I love how it’s emphasizing the human side of AI technology.”

Where’s the money?

Forgoing AI-generated visual media is a deliberate choice – one that many on Wall Street characterize as an unwise business move.

But outside of the finance world, the success of Claude’s pop-up shows that there’s a growing dissatisfaction with AI’s role in generating low-effort content in cyberspace. On X, Meta’s announcement of its new short-form AI video app, Vibes, was met with a wave of comments calling the product “slop.”

According to a Meta spokesperson, the company’s aim with Vibes is to provide free AI tools that allow anyone to create and share high-quality content. The spokesperson added that Meta’s current priority is to build a strong consumer experience and gather feedback on how people are using the feature.

By centering AI and real-world experiences, the pop-up catapulted Claude to internet virality, with over 10 million impressions across social media over the course of a weekend. But influencing customer sentiment on Anthropic will require more than free hats.

Anthropic leads the enterprise LLM API market with 32% market share and over 300,000 business customers, surpassing OpenAI’s 25% share. That’s according to a report from Menlo Ventures, one of Anthropic’s leading investors.

“It allows us to have a consumer offering that isn’t beholden to tactics like maximizing app downloads or shipping short-form video just to get more attention and more eyeballs,” McAllister said of Claude’s strong enterprise presence.

However, according to a Morgan Stanley survey of chief information officers, Anthropic is positioned to capture just 2% of incremental enterprise AI spending in 2025 – trailing behind OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Microsoft Corp (MSFT).

Read: IBM’s stock rises toward a record. Why its Anthropic deal symbolizes a new frontier in AI.

In the eyes of investors, Anthropic will need to translate the energy from the pop-up into consumer app downloads, where it’s lagging other players. The odds of Claude becoming the “best AI at the end of 2025” are at 4% on prediction market Kalshi right now, and Claude makes up less than 1% of total mobile-app downloads in the consumer LLM market, according a J.P. Morgan report by analyst Brenda Duverce.

That’s not to say that Anthropic isn’t finding success with its antislop agenda. Its run-rate revenue grew from under $1 billion at the beginning of 2025 to over $5 billion as of August, according to the company.

If Anthropic opts out of the AI visual-media market, J.P. Morgan’s Duverce believes it will be difficult to grow its already low consumer adoption relative to competitors.

“Its more limited consumer features/offerings relative to leading competitors” will lead Anthropic to “struggle to capture meaningful consumer share,” Duverce wrote. Fierce competition among AI models could lead to the commoditization of products, she added.

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