This is relevant because Anthropic is currently cast as serving mainly the coding market.
If/since their AI+process can help build new models, they can target other markets, and other companies seeking to build for such markets will partner with them first.
There's no moat and little first-mover advantage in the general-purpose AI, but there may be both in specialized AI.
Also, there are other reasons to get better. Changing how you build models can enable you to adapt to different hardware, avoiding the current Nvidia margins.
The difference between early Yahoo and Google was mainly that Google was the adult in the room: minimally invasive and mostly helpful. The early goodwill towards Google has reaped decades of rewards. I see OpenAI and Anthropic playing out the same way.
The amplifier here is the reputational risk of partnering with one or the other; I think companies would prefer to be Anthropic's partner because it's demonstrating more care, and it's less likely to horn in on the partner market (as a provider for coding but an enabler for other markets).
These attractive second-order derivatives - flywheel effect, monopoly power - are often claimed, but Anthropic is mainly providing evidence to track actual progress.
(However, if I were head of messaging at Anthropic, I would rigorously stay away from treating AI as a person; it's as agent, a delegate of humans. So I'd never say AI could build itself, just that we're getting better at building better models with AI).