OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often
They've definitely lost many experienced devs who can see Anthropic's offerings are insuperior to OpenAI/Codex; I know I am not the only one.
I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.
The people who switch back and forth between providers every month are a very small, but loud, minority.
OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".
I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.
The concern for them is if that small group expands. Moving back and forth limits perceived lock in. Someone who moves between oai and Anthropic will also move to e.g. an open source when it’s good enough for their purposes, or will start experimenting and combining. This is how the market will slip through the attempted control.
This is me and after using Muse which is free, I have not been hit with any usage limit messages and was able to build a simple iPhone app with it. It makes me question why I am again paying $20 a month for chatGPT. I did for a long while then canceled but went back to paying just a few months ago.
> the only people I hear talking about actually switching away
Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.
johnfahey · · focus · HN ↗
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
[1] <a href="https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713
Larrikin · · focus · HN ↗
drschwabe · · focus · HN ↗
hungryhobbit · · focus · HN ↗
stopthe · · focus · HN ↗
Larrikin · · focus · HN ↗
ibejoeb · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".
I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.
cgio · · focus · HN ↗
paul7986 · · focus · HN ↗
KronisLV · · focus · HN ↗
Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.