Tech­nic­ally an anti-​hero lacks the attrib­utes of the hero, of the “knight in the shin­ing armour” type. I believe that one par­tic­u­lar aspect of not being a (clas­sical) hero is the use decep­tion, liv­ing double lives, etc.

In The Mat­rix, Neo lives a double life: he works a dull cubicle job by day, helps his land­lady take out the garbage; by night he’s involved in illegal inform­a­tion trade. He is trapped into this double life and he looks for an exit: an answer and a saviour (Morpheus).

Neo is not the hero type, he chick­ens when Morph­eus asks him to climb to the building’s roof to escape cus­tody. Later he under­goes extens­ive train­ing, to “free his mind,” to become functional.

In Neur­oman­cer, Case was a hacker, but he was dam­aged, denied cyber­space and trapped into his body. That’s why his sui­cidal life in the Night City is like not his own, he works “meat” jobs; I could say that he’s trapped into a per­man­ent dull day job. He is offered an exit and a fix for his neural dam­age to become functional.

“For Case, who had lived in the bod­i­less exulta­tion of cyber­space, it was the Fall. … The body was meat. Case fell into a prison of his own flesh.”

In both cases they are offered free­dom, an escape from a prison. It is inter­est­ing to observe that while for Neo the prison is the Mat­rix, and for Case the prison is his own body; what is actu­ally imprisoned is their minds.

MORPHEUS “The Mat­rix … is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.“
NEO “What truth?“
MORPHEUS “That you are … kept inside a prison that you can­not smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.”

Both are in this aspect free­dom fight­ers, rebels by defin­i­tion, por­trayed as such by the sys­tems they fight, that those sys­tems under­line their neg­at­ive side, chan­ging the audience’s per­cep­tion on themselves.

I think that a char­ac­ter­istic of most anti-​heros is their appar­ent shift from anti-​hero to hero; I believe that this is actu­ally the shift of the audi­ence, which switches sides. Moreover, I believe that this switch­ing makes big part of the enjoy­ment of read­ing or watch­ing cyberpunk.