Anthropic is about to eat OpenAI's lunch in enterprise AI. And it all comes down to something deceptively simple called Agent Skills.
Here's the kicker: while OpenAI chases consumer headlines with Sora and ChatGPT features, Anthropic quietly built what enterprises actually need. Their Agent Skills launch on October 16th wasn't just another AI feature drop—it was a chess move that could crown them the B2B AI champion.
Think of Agent Skills as onboarding folders for AI agents. Instead of crafting perfect prompts every single time, you create reusable packages of domain expertise that Claude loads on-demand. Need your AI to follow brand guidelines? There's a skill for that. Excel processing? Another skill. Code execution with local filesystem access? Yep, covered.
<> "It's the missing piece in enterprise AI, solving standardization for procedural knowledge and context," industry analysts noted, calling it a "leap ahead" for B2B AI agents./>
But here's where Anthropic made their power play: they open-sourced the entire standard on December 18th. This isn't just altruism—it's strategic brilliance. By making Agent Skills portable across platforms, they're betting that ecosystem growth will cement their position as the enterprise AI infrastructure layer.
The numbers tell the story. Anthropic's estimated revenue hit $9 billion by end-2025, with projections reaching $26 billion in 2026. That growth trajectory is outpacing OpenAI's enterprise adoption at similar company stages. Analysts predict Anthropic could overtake OpenAI in ARR by 2027 or 2028.
What Nobody Is Talking About
Everyone's focused on the technical elegance, but they're missing the ecosystem play. Agent Skills creates something OpenAI's AgentKit can't match: true interoperability.
This opens the door to:
- Skill marketplaces where domain experts sell their knowledge packages
- Multi-agent workflows that share expertise seamlessly
- Enterprise-wide standardization that doesn't lock you into one vendor
It's like the difference between hiring consultants who speak different languages versus a team that shares the same playbook.
The timing is perfect too. While OpenAI deals with leadership drama and infrastructure scaling, Anthropic has been iterating faster in 2025 than their competitors. They already proved this approach works with their Model Context Protocol (MCP), which became an industry standard for tool integration.
The governance challenge is real though. Code execution capabilities in skills mean organizations need robust auditing and policy controls. You can't just download random skills from the internet without proper vetting. This creates demand for skill registries and enterprise governance tools—another revenue opportunity Anthropic is positioned to capture.
OpenAI's AgentKit feels less scalable in comparison. It's built for flashy demos, not the grinding operational reality of enterprise workflows. Anthropic chose the harder path: making AI that actually works in corporate environments where consistency and reliability matter more than wow factor.
The shift from one-off prompts to composable, reusable expertise packages represents a fundamental evolution in how we'll deploy AI at work. It's not just about having a smart chatbot anymore—it's about building AI that understands your business context and gets better over time.
This is why Anthropic might become the generative AI leader for B2B. They're not chasing the next shiny feature. They're building the infrastructure that enterprises will depend on for the next decade.
The real test comes in 2026 when those revenue projections either prove prescient or overly optimistic. But if Agent Skills adoption follows the MCP trajectory, OpenAI might find themselves playing catch-up in the market that actually pays the bills.
