Thousands of people flocked to downtown San Francisco this week for HumanX, one of the year’s biggest AI conferences, proving that people still prefer interacting with humans over AI agents.
When I spoke to venture capitalists and founders at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the consensus was clear. Anthropic is Silicon Valley’s new favorite, he says. This sentiment is in sharp contrast to last year’s first HumanX, held at a Las Vegas casino, where most VCs put their chips in OpenAI.
“Last year in Las Vegas, it felt like OpenAI was the clear winner, and now it looks like Anthropic is miles ahead,” said Roseanne Winsek of Renegade Partners. “Anthropic’s products are very good.”
Last year, Anthropic had yet to widely release Claude Code or Claude 4. Now Claude Code is a phenomenon. Both companies are preparing to go public, and Anthropic is releasing models that are the envy of the industry. At a valuation of $380 billion, some venture capitalists believe it’s a better bargain compared to OpenAI’s lofty $852 billion valuation, especially Anthropic, which this week announced run-rate revenue of more than $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.
“They’re crushing it,” Jared Quincy Davis, founder and CEO of AI cloud platform Mithril, said of Anthropic. “It’s clear that it was a great decision for them to make a conscious decision to focus on enterprise, frontier features and coding and not go into some consumer use cases.”
OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.
While there was universal praise for Anthropic, it was hard to find anyone with good things to say about OpenAI. Is it because of embarrassment over the recent acquisition of Internet talk show TBPN or questions about CEO Sam Altman’s contract with the Department of Defense? Most founders and VCs remained reluctant to criticize OpenAI publicly.
“There are quite a few people who are against Sam and what he’s doing,” said Andy Chen, a former partner at Coatue and Kleiner Perkins who expects an exodus of talent from OpenAI. “And Anthropic has tripled its revenue in the past three months.”
As if Anthropic didn’t have enough momentum already, they announced their latest model, the Mythos, midway through the conference. It is so powerful that it cannot be released to the general public yet due to the risk of cyberattack.
Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures, said, “The Mythos model is a huge topic. There’s a huge amount of excitement.”
This year’s HumanX was twice as big as last year, with about 6,700 attendees paying more than $4,000 per ticket for the chance to rub shoulders with industry heavyweights like Lovable co-founder Anton Osika and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.
HumanX humanoid and robot dogs Human X/ALX Media
Across the expansive exhibition floor, AI genetic security startups and startups building autonomous workflows were handing out branded hoodies, water bottles, and notebooks. Each day, participants received an AI-generated list of people to have lunch with and which sessions to attend. (The list I got wasn’t very helpful, as it just regurgitated a list of other VC journalists to meet.)
Robotic humanoids and dogs roamed the floor, but the nearby HumanX Dog Park’s real dogs with real fur proved to be far more popular.
There was also a “retro lounge” with pinball machines and jukeboxes, a replica of a New York City bodega, and a wellness lounge offering massages. The non-AI attractions seemed designed to calm the nerves of anxious attendees, worried about what the future holds for AI.
“The mood I’m feeling is one of elation and existential dread,” says Stephen Weitz, former Microsoft executive and co-founder and CEO of HumanX. “The two cannot be reconciled.”
HumanX dog park HumanX/ROHM Travel PR
The rapid change in sentiment since last year reflects the dizzying pace of advances in AI, leaving VCs exhausted.
“Every day I wake up, something has changed in a meaningful way,” Tungs said. “Everything is changing so quickly that everyone is in a hurry.”
No one was ready to consider OpenAI as models were advancing rapidly. The betting favorites may have changed when HumanX returns to Las Vegas next year.
“These things change very quickly,” Winsek said. “OpenAI will probably come back.”