Do AI Labs Like Anthropic and OpenAI Have Economic Moats?

Morningstar is rolling out coverage of artificial intelligence labs ahead of Anthropic’s expected IPO. A key question will be whether the companies have economic moats—sustainable competitive advantages that will help them outpace competitors. In the first part of a three-part series, based on our full research report, we study whether companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have moats.

In the almost four years since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, our technology equity research team has heard one alarmingly simple concern time and again: If every large language model can write the same email, summarize the same earnings, and generate a coherent block of code, can the firms building these LLMs really earn outsized profits?

We began hearing this question in 2024 and 2025, concerning whether public cloud vendors—such as Amazon AMZN, Microsoft MSFT, and Alphabet GOOG/GOOGL, which have each poured billions into partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI—could earn reasonable returns on their large AI-related expenditures. In 2026, with investors eyeing potential IPOs in the AI lab space, the question is aimed more at labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, as investors try to figure out whether they are on a fast track to commodification or building durable businesses.