OpenAI's position in the AI conversation is not the same as market leadership — it is something more structural. Every announcement from a competing lab, every funding round, every acquisition gets processed through the question of what it means for OpenAI's position. Anthropic crossing a significant ARR milestone becomes a story about OpenAI's imitation of Anthropic's safety frameworks rather than Anthropic's own strategic choices. Google licensing code from Windsurf after OpenAI's deal collapsed becomes a story about OpenAI's deal-making pace rather than Google's developer tooling strategy. The companies competing…