Based on literary writings, how would you define a cyberpunk anti-hero?

Good heavens. 1992 called, they want their literary tropes back. There are people born after this trope ceased to be relevant who are now old enough to vote.

If you’re talking old-school cyberpunk, the typical cyberpunk antihero is:

An outlaw or criminal;

Of low wealth and social status;

With an ambiguous, survivalist set of morals and ethics;

In a high to very high tech society;

That is largely nihilistic and dystopian;

Defined economically by extreme, runaway wealth inequality;

In which private corporations hold so much de facto power that governments are all but irrelevant;

Where the protagonist has some skill or ability, usually technical, that places him or her at the upper reaches of hacking or some related skill;

With a plot characterized by “protagonist of low social status and class in conflict with a far larger, wealthier, and more socially privileged adversary.”

I mean, that’s basically your template for straight-up cyberpunk right there.

Thing is, basically nobody is writing straight-up cyberpunk any more. Not even William Gibson. The Blue Ant books are kinda still cyberpunk in the old sense, maybe, if you squint hard enough, but the Jackpot books aren’t.

Cyberpunk has largely given way to post-cyberpunk: Nexus; Altered Carbon; Machinehood; the novel Eunice and I just published under a pen name, immechanica. I mean, hell, a lot of folks even call Snow Crash post-cyberpunk.

Post-cyberpunk is less dystopian, less nihilistic, less defined by extreme wealth inequality (though it may still exist), and less fixated on a weird fetishistic Orientialist technofuturism, a hallmark of most early straight-up cyberpunk.