Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
Anthropic ran a Super Bowl ad mocking OpenAI. Altman fired back calling them "authoritarian." And then today — both companies dropped major announcements within hours of each other. Anthropic released Opus 4.6, their most powerful model yet. OpenAI countered with Frontier, a new platform for building AI agents in the enterprise. Meanwhile, OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent built by one guy, has gone viral, and the software selloff is spreading from CRMs to legal tech to video games. A year ago, ChatGPT felt untouchable. Now it's a full-on war for the enterprise, the developer, and the consumer. We sit down with Guillermo Rauch, co-founder and CEO of Vercel, to make sense of it all. Vercel powers some of the biggest sites on the internet, including ChatGPT, and Guillermo works with both OpenAI and Anthropic. He's the perfect person to tell us where this goes next. This is a follow-up to our conversation with Replit CEO Amjad Masad a few weeks ago on the AI coding revolution. If you missed it, link here: https://youtube.com/live/GOa3SfkQ0vE We'll cover: The OpenAI vs Anthropic rivalry and whether Altman is on the back foot What Opus 4.6 and OpenAI Frontier actually mean for enterprises OpenClaw: why an open-source agent built by one guy is outpacing trillion-dollar companies Claude Code vs Codex: what's the real difference? The software selloff: which companies should be nervous, and which shouldn't What AI still can't build (and where it falls apart) The changes coming in the next year that most people aren't ready for For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/42d859g » Subscribe to CNBC TV: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCtelevision » Subscribe to CNBC: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC » Watch CNBC on the go with CNBC+: https://www.cnbc.com/WatchCNBCPlus Turn to CNBC TV for the latest stock market news and analysis. From market futures to live price updates CNBC is the leader in business news worldwide. Connect with CNBC News Online Get the latest news: http://www.cnbc.com/ Follow CNBC on LinkedIn: https://cnb.cx/LinkedInCNBC Follow CNBC News on Instagram: https://cnb.cx/InstagramCNBC Follow CNBC News on Facebook: https://cnb.cx/LikeCNBC Follow CNBC on Threads: https://cnb.cx/threads Follow CNBC News on X: https://cnb.cx/FollowCNBC Follow CNBC on WhatsApp: https://cnb.cx/WhatsAppCNBC https://www.cnbc.com/select/best-credit-cards/ #CNBC #CNBCTV Vercel CEO on the OpenAI vs. Anthropic war — 2/5/2026
Hi everyone. It is Thursday, February 5th, and I'm Jared Draosa with another Tech Check live stream. You might remember if you tuned in a few weeks ago, we sat down with the Replet co. I'm Jad Msad and talked about this AI coding revolution. How people like me and producer Jasmine with zero technical background are suddenly building and shipping real apps. I'm not saying they're any good, at least mine anyways, but we are building them. That itself felt like a big moment, but this week's
even this day makes that feel like it was just a warm-up. Uh since then, the software selloff, it has only accelerated and it has spread. It started with project management tools and CRM. Now it's hitting legal tech, video game developers, financial data companies. JP Morgan out with a note this week and they put it this way. It's a broad sweeping mass exodus of software stocks. And I might put it another way. It has been mostly a bloodbath. Now also over the last few weeks, we've had
OpenClaw. You might have heard of it. It's an open- source AI agent built by just one guy, and it has gone absolutely viral. Essentially, you hook it up to your computer and it give it full access and just let it do things, act, build, book things on your behalf. Uh, OpenAI, meanwhile, has launched Codex, a new version of it, its answer to Cloud Code. Altman says that Codex is the company's most loved internal product ever. But somehow, at least it feels like to us, it seems like it's still struggling to
get the same kind of buzz that Claude Code has been able to achieve, especially over the last few weeks. And by the way, nobody seems to be talking about Gemini 3 anymore, but as we know, that could change very quickly. Um, what else has happened? Anthropic has really pounced on this moment yesterday, dropping that Super Bowl ad, which I hope everyone has seen, taking direct shots at OpenAI for putting ads in chat, GBT. You had Alman firing back on X, calling Anthropic authoritarian, and this whole debate over elitism in AI.
And then today, guys, both companies, they have dropped major announcements. Anthropic released Opus 4.6, their most powerful model yet. It can work directly inside PowerPoint. It can pull together regulatory filings, run teams of agents in parallel. Open AAI countering with Frontier, new enterprise platform to build and manage AI agents. The pitch for them is that they can do real work across your entire business. Okay, so that's now, but a year ago, Chat GPT felt untouchable. Now it is a full-on
war for the enterprise, for the developer, for the consumer. So we wanted to go deeper and GMO Roach, she is co-founder and CEO of Verscell, one of the most important infrastructure companies in tech right now, last valued at more than$9 billion. If you have used Chat GPT, you have used Verscell. He's been building the AI tools that are changing how developers work. And he works with both OpenAI and Anthropic. So he is really the perfect person to help us make sense of it all. GMO, thank you so much for joining us.
>> Thanks for having me. It's exciting to be here, especially this week. There's so much happening with AI >> the last week, the last few weeks. I mean, Jasmine and I were kind of just like bystanders. We're onlookers. I can't imagine what it's been like to be on the inside. We had Lisa Sue, the CEO of AMD on our air yesterday, and she said that she's also been blown away by the last 60 to 90 days. You couldn't be more of an insider as well. So, what are you seeing? Is this acceleration? Is the hype all real? >> Yeah, to just give you a picture, right?
Verscell is a place where developers host a lot of the new applications they build and deploy to the cloud. So whenever you have an idea, Versell makes it so easy to just make it real. And increasingly, you know, when we started 10 years ago, you needed to have hard programming skills. What happened during the Christmas season like just like the the week of Christmas and the week of New Year's every person that I know was playing with Opus 4.5 vibe coding and bringing new applications live. We saw a