Seriously, I don't know what the fuck is going on at Anthropic lately, but I feel like sometimes I can't tell who does a better job of doing positive advertising for Codex between Anthropic and OpenAI.
Before I go further, since every time I think about posting this I know there's going to be some contingent of people who are going to rush to tell me how flawed OpenAI is and how "blah blah blah Scam Altman" I don't give a shit. With the way these AI companies are moving, they are out to extract as much value out of me and the world as possible, so I'm going to evaluate them as a consumer, not a shareholder or someone who gives a damn where either company will be in a few months (and I urge you to do the same, tomorrow it could be OpenAI fucking up, don't have loyalties). This post is just entirely about the way that I feel like I have been treated by both companies as an end user and a consumer in the last few months. So no, this isn't going to have opinions on Sam Altman or Dario Amodei or The Pentagon/Palantir.
In the past few months, Anthropic has:
- Been clear as mud about third party harnesses, all the way up until the Apr 7th email where they finally decided to take a stance on it, and even now, it is nebulous what constitutes harness usage and what's just Claude SDK usage
- Done a shit job of communicating any policy changes (seriously, WHO is their devrel team? do they even have one?)
- Gaslit the fuck out of its Claude Code users who were literally screaming at them that there was a bug causing massive usage issues, only to finally admit it months later and just shrug it off (no credits, no refunds, no apologies, just a massive AF post-mortem) link
- Did an "A/B" test on live production involving pricing changes that would remove Claude Code from the $20 tier, told everyone they were being ridiculous about it and it was "just a test", a test that somehow also managed to change the documentation globally to reflect the change that was "just a test"
- Ended up making the change even more official afterwards with a series of tweets
- Added the most idiotic "detection" mechanism for third party harnesses by forcibly turning on Extra Usage if they spot a HERMES.md file in your repository, and as of 5 days ago, it's still happening
- Have had such terrible uptime, that memes like this are floating around don Twitter: https://x.com/wongmjane/status/2044437095025140188 (seriously, this is utterly pathetic for a multi-billion dollar company)
- Nuked an entire company from Claude access over a misunderstanding and then provided no meaningful support except a Google Form to get help/appeal (https://x.com/patomolina/status/2045254152377323970)
- Not only leaked the entire source code of the client (which is REALLY not great for optics), their response to the leak was shotgun DMCA'ing all kinds of Claude repos that didn't even contain Claude source code
- Thought it was a good idea to launch a "Code Review" service that averages $15-$25 per review to review your code...which Claude itself writes...which makes sense...how!?
- Actually banned Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw creator) after explicitly telling him his usage of OpenClaw was fine, and then one random engineer was apparently claiming that no one has ever been banned because of OpenClaw...which is categorically not true
- Released a dramatically underwhelming Opus 4.7, not long after releasing 4.6 which was also when the rampant destruction of token usage began
Seriously. What in god's name is going on at that company? Even now, when I put my OpenCode OAuth plugin on the shelf, and I just use Claude Code directly with no custom agents.md, no skill files, no MCP servers, nothing that could drain the context, 80,000 tokens in, and I'm already 7% of the way through my 5hr quota on the 5x $100 plan. It was never like this before. Even if I try to use claude -p to ensure that nothing else gets sent, the usage just gets destroyed.
And christ getting clear comms out of them...if Thariq or Boris tweet the phrase "for clarity" you know you're about to hear some shit that's going to be anything but clear.
Meanwhile, over in OpenAI land, OpenAI has:
- Put out steadily improving Codex models
- Put out quite possibly the best possible image model, and added it to Codex to allow for an insane image-to-UI workflow that works really well
- Granted phenomenal rate limits, which even though they were only supposed to be promotional, continued on, and now the 20x (which is 25x until the end of May, and then it goes back to the original 20x) and I have a distinct feeling that with their compute, they're revving up to push it out even further (but I could be wrong)
- Completely open sourced and continuously improved on the Codex CLI
- Completely embraced third party harnesses with native first-party OpenCode support (which is seriously one of the best ways to use Codex)
- Significantly improved on the Codex desktop to the point where almost completely eclipsed Claude's desktop app (honestly, they're just a few features away from completely dominating, like chat + mobile access). This thing is a joy to use and the only thing I'm missing from it are mobile access and showing me thinking traces. If those get added in (and mobile is at least expected soon) then it'll be perfect
- When they make mistakes or change things, they don't hesitate to reset rate limits. As far as I'm aware, Anthropic has only ever reset rate limits once and that was one the day of most people's reset anyway.
- Done an excellent job with community outreach. The number of times I see Tibo, Jason Liu, Brockman, even Altman himself directly engaging with users and listening to feedback, and how they handle themselves makes Anthropic's weird "Just leave it to Thariq/Boris" public relations strategy look embarrassingly pathetic
I don't care about what either company did in the past, and I don't care about what either company ends up becoming. At this point in time, when I think about the list of comapnies that I feel actually respects me as a user, I am unable to find any real or dealbreaking fault with OpenAI and the service its providing me. Maybe we've all just gotten so utterly cynical and pessimistic about tech and the internet, but it feels refreshing to me that OpenAI seems to keep listening to users and keeps making the service better and better.
Who knows, maybe at Anthropic's dev event tomorrow they're going to blow my mind, but I doubt it. The rumors look like it's just another version of an autonomous assistant that everyone and their mothers is currently making.