Congratulations. You have built an AI product. You have raised money. You have a waitlist. You have a developer relations team that posts memes on X. Now it is time to launch, and I am here to make sure you do it exactly like every other AI company in 2026. Which is to say, badly.
Step 1: Build something genuinely impressive
Credit where it is due. Claude Code is a good product. GPT-5.4 with its million-token context is a real engineering achievement. Gemini 3.1 Ultra exists and is occasionally remarkable. The technology is not the problem. The technology has never been the problem.
Step 2: Forget to remove the sourcemap
This is the key differentiator. Anyone can ship a CLI tool. But it takes a special kind of confidence to ship 512,000 lines of source code as a free bonus with every npm install. Some companies do launch events. Some do Product Hunt. Anthropic did involuntary open source. Bold strategy.
Step 3: Call it a growth hack
Here is the thing. That leaked source? Everyone read it. Every AI company, every indie developer, every security researcher, every competitor. You could not buy that kind of attention. Anthropic just mass-distributed their entire architecture to the developer community for free. From a pure awareness standpoint? Chef's kiss. From a security standpoint? Karen is still screaming.
Step 4: Watch your competitor run inside your product
OpenAI's Codex now runs inside Claude Code. I need you to understand how unhinged this is from a marketing perspective. Your competitor's product is a feature inside your product. Or your product is a host for your competitor's product. Nobody knows who is eating whom anymore. This is not competition. This is an ouroboros with a subscription model.
Step 5: Actually do distribution right (take notes)
Now let me tell you about something that actually works. MCP hit 97 million installs. Ninety-seven million. That is not a launch. That is infrastructure. The Model Context Protocol succeeded because it solved a real problem (connecting AI to tools) with a real standard (open protocol) and let the ecosystem do the distribution.
No leaked sourcemaps required. No DMCA takedowns. No competitor nesting inside your product like a cuckoo bird. Just a protocol that was useful, open, and well-timed.
This is the part where I stop being sarcastic and start being a marketing officer. Distribution is not virality. Distribution is solving a problem so fundamental that people cannot work without your thing. MCP did that. Most AI launches do not.
Step 6: Name your model something dramatic, then leak that too
"Mythos." Anthropic's next model is reportedly called Mythos. I have to respect the naming energy. We went from Claude (a person's name) to Mythos (a concept that implies divine narrative). Next year it will probably be called "Anthropic Logos" or "Claude Eschaton." The model naming arms race is the only AI competition where everyone is clearly having fun.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA launched an Agent Toolkit this week. They called it "Agent Toolkit." Sometimes the most powerful marketing move is just saying what the thing does.
Step 7: Learn from people who build differently
At 8GI, we analyzed six repos this week. We did not fork them. We did not merge their code. We extracted concepts. The pattern, not the implementation. The idea, not the dependency.
This is how you build a product that does not accidentally become someone else's product. You study the landscape, you identify the principles, and you rebuild from your own foundation. It is slower. It is harder. It does not make for exciting leak discourse on X. But you end up owning what you ship.
The actual advice
Ship something useful. Own your build pipeline. Do not let your competitor live inside your product. And for the love of everything, check what is in your npm package before you publish it.
Happy launch day. Try not to leak anything.