Evaluating OpenAI vs Anthropic for Growth Method OS

The AI world has two clear frontrunners right now: OpenAI and Anthropic. But here's the thing—they're playing completely different games.

Two very different visions

OpenAI wants to put a personal AI assistant in everyone's pocket. Think of it like giving every person their own digital sidekick that can help with anything from writing emails to planning holidays.

Anthropic? They're thinking bigger picture. They want Claude to be the backend infrastructure that powers other companies' AI products. Instead of talking directly to consumers, they're building the rails that let businesses create autonomous AI agents. It's very much an enterprise play.

This difference matters more than you might think. It shapes everything from how they design their models to who they partner with.

How we evaluated them

At Growth Method, we needed to pick our LLM provider carefully. So we broke down what mattered most to us:

The high-priority stuff—like data privacy and safety—basically became deal-breakers. If a provider couldn't nail these, we wouldn't even consider them.

What surprised us? Pricing ended up in the low-priority bucket. Not because cost doesn't matter, but because when you're building something that could scale to millions of users, reliability and safety trump saving a few quid per API call.

Our multi-vendor strategy

Here's what we decided: we're not putting all our eggs in one basket.

Claude has been showing some serious strength in multi-turn conversations and understanding large amounts of context. For complex reasoning tasks—the kind where you need the AI to follow a long thread of logic—Claude often outperforms GPT-4.

But OpenAI isn't standing still. Their ecosystem is massive, and they keep shipping improvements.

So we're testing both. In our development and staging environments, we run OpenAI and Anthropic side-by-side for everything: AI summaries, auto-categorisation, auto-prioritisation, and our data assistant features.

The goal? Stay flexible. We built our system so we can swap providers if one starts pulling ahead or if our needs change. Getting locked into one vendor's ecosystem is a risk we're not willing to take.

The real difference

After months of testing, here's what we've learned: the choice between OpenAI and Anthropic often comes down to what you're building.

Need something consumer-friendly with lots of integrations? OpenAI's ecosystem is hard to beat. Building enterprise software that needs to handle complex, multi-step reasoning? Claude might be your better bet.

But honestly? The gap is narrowing fast. Both companies are iterating so quickly that advantages in one area can disappear in a single model update.

That's exactly why our multi-vendor approach makes sense. Instead of trying to predict which company will 'win,' we're positioned to benefit from both of their innovations.

The AI world changes too fast to bet everything on one horse. Better to keep your options open and let the technology speak for itself.

'We are on-track to deliver a 43% increase in inbound leads this year. There is no doubt the adoption of Growth Method is the primary driver behind these results.'

Laura Perrott, Colt Technology Services

Growth Method is the GrowthOS built for marketing teams focused on pipeline — not projects. Book a call at https://cal.com/stuartb/30min.

Want to dive deeper into AI model comparisons? Check out OpenAI's documentation and Anthropic's model cards for detailed technical specifications.