I was going to say that I was surprised that enough "normal" users had heard about the Pentagon news story that it would make a difference.
Then I remembered that the app store rankings [1] seem to be based on activity from just the past day or so.
And so a lot of "plugged-in" users switching to Claude all at once then would be enough to briefly send Claude to #1, since the migration would be sizeable in comparison to the normal daily download baseline.
But we can also expect that this would probably be just a blip for a couple of days, as it's unlikely to make much difference in the baseline ratio for the general population.
Obvious political reasons and implications aside, a clear quality gap opened up late last year when Opus 4.5 was released vs. GPT-5. Opus was obviously and demonstrably superior to any GPT-5 tier. The release of GPT-5.2 didn't improve matters, and then Opus 4.6 widened the gap further. Right now talking to GPT-5.2 Pro is 10x slower than chatting with Opus 4.6 and the output returned is, nevertheless, generally lower quality and more "sloppy."
What I'm getting at is that this could be, in part, because Claude is genuinely better at this point in time.
Weirdly enough, I agree with both sides. Opus beats every version of GPT 5 as a chat interface, hands down. ChatGPT, at this point, is mostly me correcting its output style, cadence, behavior, etc, and consistently remaining dissatisfied, meanwhile Opus one-shots things I didn’t even think it could (Typst code).
All that said, I do my programming in OpenAI’s Codex app for Mac. It has completely dominated Claude Code for me. I’ll only ever use Opus to check 5.3-Codex’s work.
Very weird world we’re living in. I hope it gets even weirder once Deepseek does whatever they’ve been cooking.
whatever they've been cooking at deepseek, i don't think i'm going to let their coding agent run shell stuff on my computer unless they make it free or something
Something very weird is going on; I just tried a free trial of Codex-5.3, and a significant fraction of what it gives me doesn't even compile (or in the case of python, run without crashing).
Unless I specifically say "use git", it won't bother using git, apparently saying "configure AGENTS.md to us best practices" isn't enough for it to (at least in this case) use git. If this was isolated I might put that down to bad luck, given the nature of LLMs, but I have been finding Codex uses the wrong approaches all over the place, also stops in the middle of tasks, skips some tasks entirely (sometimes while marking them as done, other times it just doesn't get around to it).
I'd rank the output of Claude as similar to a junior with 1-3 years experience. It's not great, but it's certainly serviceable, a bit of tweaking even shippable. Codex… what I see is more like a student project. Or perhaps someone in the first month of their first job. Even the absolute worst human developers I've worked with after university weren't as bad as Codex, but several of them I'd rank worse than Claude.
What where you using it for? claude is really good at agentic stuff, Pure coding, I can see codex being better, but for the entire workflow, I'm not sure
I use Codex purely for coding, and that's 90% of my use case for AI in general (10% using ChatGPT web for misc stuff). I pop out to Opus in Claude Code regularly to try to stay up on their relative performance, but so far the primary value I've been able to derive from CC is as a second set of eyes for code review / poking holes in plans. For primary planning / debugging / implementation Codex outclasses it atm sadly.
Me too. It's great that my employer pays for it and there's basically no budget, because this configuration is 10x more expensive than the regular default Sonnet.
Agree on the gap - in my own complex greenfield software dev spec test, opus 4.6 blows codex 5.3 out of the water, by wide margin, both in ui and backend.
Massivly better and I cannot understand how many comments online say that they're comparable (other than paid actors which now fits the right wing angle that OpenAI takes because right wing paid online comments seems quite common overall).
I remember on the Opus 4.5 release data watching what it can do to my test app I wanted it to build and saying outloud to myself "oh shit" because of how much better it was at the conversation, planning, understanding, and building. Posts like this[0] say similar things, where Opus 4.5 release + Claude Code was the tipping point and the gap is widening and Anthropic has infinite more momentum and going in the better direction with useful models that aren't fully aligned with bad actors.
Yep. For the past month I’ve been doing this thing where every time I need something from AI, I give Opus and Codex the same prompt. Opus is just better by a wide margin, especially on complex tasks. It uses tools quite a lot, taps into available MCP servers when it makes sense, and can think about repercussions down the line much better. Codex I feel is optimized for brevity, approaching terseness. Hard to put my finger on it but it’s never as thorough and it always misses important details.
no, it is because of the public perspection of Anthropic holding a principled stance against allowing their software to pull the trigger and kill humans. ChatGPT still has the bigger brand name recognition.
Anyone who's used both Claude and ChatGPT will instantly agree what is better by a large margin. Theres maybe a brand recognition long tail but its more likely theyre the rare occasional users who use the free tier. Thus ChatGPT is becoming the shitty free AI app while Claude is what you use to get real work done. Time (in months) will tell yow this will go.
If that's entirely the case, there could still be interesting implications, as people who switch to Claude are unlikely to switch back to ChatGPT in the near future. (If, that is, they regularly use LLMs for any technical or professional task.)
Well, apparently they give you some miniscule rewards points for meeting step or activity goals. I told my wife who was immediately intrigued. Pump out more apps that appeal to women.
This does not check out for me intuitively. You are telling me Dick's sporting goods with 800 stores was able to get to the top of the app store leaderboard, which companies spend a lot of effort and money on, against the largest AI behemoths, by giving rewards on activity goals? I think it has to be something else.
United healthcare does that too and it’s great because it’s just straight cash on a visa gift card. Like 1.25 a week for just doing your normal stuff and more for hitting other goals. Easy to rig too…
I did not realise there are ads for LLMs. Of course if I thought about it, I would conclude that there must be. But somehow the concept seems strange to me. What do they advertise? The LLM can do so many different things… I guess they are all “welcome! To the world of tomorrow!”
Then again, I know nothing about ads these days. Last time I had any ad exposure was twenty years ago, when I lived at home with my parents.
I've previously seen some ads for Claude on YouTube, mainly following the style of a programmer influencer talking about it. But I'm more of a technical audience.
Though, I happened to be watching the Superbowl, and Anthropic was all in taking pot shots at OpenAI's recent decision to start incorperating ads. Very much addressed towards a general audience. Here's one of them for example: https://youtu.be/FBSam25u8O4
Anyone else having issues exporting their data from ChatGPT? I started my export in the morning, still have yet to receive an email for the download. Wanted to make sure my deleted account was included in the beans when they count them on Monday.
Typical SV/ Scam Altman tactics : technically trying to keep people from moving out of their walled prison-garden. It exemplifies how important open-standards and data export laws are.
It’s irritating to me that on iOS at least I can’t be logged in with both my work AND home Claude instances in the native app. I instead have to log in to the app with one and use a desktop shortcut to claude.ai for the other.
Yeah, being able to switch quickly between amounts is my number one request for the iOS app right now. Logging in on the browser is a good idea though.
I'd just been using the free version of OpenAI for my easy tasks, so as not to waste my Claude credits on them. About time I deleted it and gave it the poor review it deserves.
I’m not sure why everybody else likes it, but for me, the Move feature gives me 3 points per day for doing what I already do (10k steps, 3mi run, or 30 active minutes). It makes the $10 rewards flow in more quickly.
I cancelled ChatGPT and downloaded Claude mobile 1 day before the controversy because I decided to go all in on Claude Code. The chat app isn't quite as good as ChatGPT, feels like a year behind in integration with stuff like web search and retrieval. But it does the job.
Am I the only one who claims that Claude always was better than gpt? Used them both in parallel (each for it's own set of tasks) for a long time, an now gpt isn't worth paying for (tbh, rarely use it for anything lately) - regardless of news.
rsync.net is (minimally) an openai customer. I've used it mostly as a curiosity but others here have used it in more professional manner.
When we created the account we shared essentially zero personal information and used a purpose-specific email, etc. No ID scans, no passports, no robust ID verification. It is a company account, after all, so it would make no sense to tie it to a particular person ...
All of this to ask:
In 2026, if I choose to boycott openAI on behalf of my firm, and perhaps sign up for Claude with the intention of using either the web interface or a terminal CLI ... what will be demanded in terms of identity and personal information ?
IME, zero. None of them require things like this for the web interface or terminal CLI.
And if you want to use the API? OpenAI requires full identity documentation upload and potentially selfies sending to Persona (the exact thing Discord was just chastised over) if you want to use a remotely recent model. Anthropic doesn't ask for any of this - and neither does any other model provider.
I read the terms regarding mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Both OpenAI and Anthropic had similar holdbacks AFAICT. [0]
> The Pentagon has agreed to OpenAI's rules for deploying its technology safely in classified settings, though no contract has been signed, a source familiar with the talks tells Axios.
> Why it matters: The Pentagon has blasted OpenAI rival Anthropic for days, contending its red lines for AI use in the military -- mass surveillance and autonomous weapons -- are philosophical and "woke."
> Now, the department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, appears to have accepted OpenAI's similar conditions.
One big difference
OpenAI exec becomes top Trump donor with $25 million gift [1]
I guess that makes it "less woke". This is reprehensible political bullshit.
This is hardly surprising given that OpenAI already signed a military contract. [0]
Where was the open letter then? No-one cared.
Recently, Claude was already used by the administration for the operation in Venezuela [1] alongside Palantir. Anthropic did nothing at the time and again...
No-one cared.
Now everyone cares when Anthropic finally said No? The decision for the contract was already predetermined for OpenAI, even with the open letter.
So the question is, why wasn't the open letter against OpenAI done last year when they signed that first military contract?
Either way, it seems that OpenAI and Anthropic were all OK with the US government using their models for warfare so really there is no point in defending both of them or even the employees who knew beforehand.
>Now everyone cares when Anthropic finally said No?
DoD started asking for the ability to do more stuff. That's the issue here.
"Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Mass domestic surveillance... Fully autonomous weapons." https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
>So the question is, why wasn't the open letter against OpenAI done last year when they signed that first military contract?
again, this story isn't about people that are against any military contract.
I think people that aren’t objecting to AI mass surveillance of populations: haven’t recognized how thorough and invasive these technologies will become; think the current governments share their values and lists of enemies; naively think government priorities will never change, and that scopes will never increase.
> DoD started asking for the ability to do more stuff. That's the issue here.
The DoD (NSA) has crossed those lines before with big tech when they allowed mass domestic surveillance on their own citizens (PRISIM) in the past. They are willing to break laws to get the job done which probably in 10 years time those actions would be found illegal later. By then it would be too late.
Companies should expect that governments may try to bend or even break rules or laws under veiled pretenses.
So why expect that they would be any different today? It is the nature of governments.
Scorpion (DoD) tells frog (Anthropic) to help them cross the river on the condition that they won't kill them. If you knew that the Scorpion always breaches the contract first, why work with them in the first place?
> again, this story isn't about people that are against any military contract.
Gen AI mass surveillance conducted by the adminstration (or any) is already done by Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle and Palantir and soon xAI (via X). So again, no point is being made here.
Given all the above, the clear indication was OpenAI already signed a military contract last year. Why didn't the employees and insiders make an open letter pledging that AI should not be used for mass surveillance back then?
>mass surveillance conducted by the adminstration (or any) is already done by Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle and Palantir and soon xAI (via X). So again, no point is being made here.
some companies do it, so that means anthropic has to do it? this seems like nihilism
> some companies do it, so that means anthropic has to do it?
Then I would have expected open letters from anon OpenAI employees from the very beginning in 2025 when those military contracts were signed as a reassurance / pledge around those certain boundaries since they ultimately knew. But of course, only after Anthropic rejected the DoW in 2026. Very late for that.
Anthropic should've known about PRISIM and the nature of governments and should have not tested the benefit of the doubt in the first place since it's directly incompatible with their 'principles'. Otherwise none of this would have happened.
Their first mistake was trusting the government (especially this one) and like almost all of them, they are ready to test what they can get away with and breach the contract first.
Anthropic naively expected that the administration (and any other) of this time would change for the better today. Their lesson is that they should never trust governments to agree to their contracts.
How sure are we that something fishy isn't going on with the models and the alignment research teams and the answers the model is giving? Like maybe Claude's alignment made it worse at trying to mask as Allied Magacomputer than GPT and that's why they're up in arms?
Great timing, especially since Anthropic has been shipping huge improvements in their iOS app. Now they've replaced their Stone Age audio input and added live mode, the iOS experience is a lot closer to ChatGPT's (though still lacking a bit)
And the sheer irony of Americans proclaiming Anthropic as morally superior because of it. Do they think America is the only country or something? I thought that was just a trope.
When has the US govt and its allies been secretive about spying on non-citizens? We literally have agreements with European allies to collaborate on it.
Other people are human and I agree that violence used against non-Americans overseas should be used only with very serious consideration and with checks and safeguards (albeit not with the same absolute protections as when used domestically).
But privacy? Yeah, no, if it benefits the safety or interests of US even slightly to know what the world is thinking, seeing, and planning, I have zero qualms using all tools at our disposal.
As usual, the corporations benefiting from supporting war and subverting the rights of everyday citizens is rewarded by massive subsidies by the capitalist state.
Anthropic currently is winning the public sentiment war, but OpenAI is being established as another to-big-to-fail capitalist regime institution.
I am one of the people who uninstalled ChatGPT and closed their account and installed Claude in the last 24 hours. I know plenty of others who did the same. I wonder whether this trend can be sustained.
So dumb, I have to think it's astroturfed. Anthropic states they're not willing to help with autonomous weapons because it's not good enough yet, and suddenly everyone cancels their OAI subscription? I just don't get it
People don't want salt on their injuries. If OpenAI announced the military contract a few months later no one would care. But they announced it on the same day and that pissed many people (read: maybe 0.1% of ChatGPT users) off.
Do any autonomous weapons have an LLM usecase yet? As opposed to say, specialized visual ML stuff that can fit on a small portable system.
The DoD office staff using it for information analysis, similar to Palantir providing data integration software, isn't quite the same as using it for weapons.
That’s part of why this is all so stupid. Anthropic’s red lines seem very reasonable. Feels incredibly arbitrary for the DoD to cancel the contract and declare it a supply chain risk.
That's the way I see it. I've commented previously that I see this mostly as a Soviet-style loyalty test not really about the specific technical concerns of developing weapon systems or surveillance.
They stated 2 red lines, mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, as a result Trump admin threw a hissy fit and cancelled all military contracts going forward and designated them a supply chain risk to further punish them. https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070
OpenAI on the other hand after all this is openly partnering and seemingly has no such red lines and has given milquetoast explanations as to why this is acceptable. What is surprising about the boycott?
I can't prove there was no astroturfing, but I was personally absolutely furious and hard-deleted my account Friday evening. I'm not sure how to bridge the gap in understanding, this story was extremely radicalizing for me, I'm genuinely hoping now that OpenAI burns to the ground.
The sticking point seems to be that Anthropic didn't want to help the Trump regime spying on its own citizens (by using Claude to sift through mass-surveillance data)
I went the opposite and deleted Claude and replaced it with OpenAI - The money the US Military will bring in is going to elevate ChatGPT to levels the others cannot match
the claude contract was only 100M/year. about 0.7% of Claude's 14B revenue run rate. Not sure we know anything about the number for openai's new contract.
Then I remembered that the app store rankings [1] seem to be based on activity from just the past day or so.
And so a lot of "plugged-in" users switching to Claude all at once then would be enough to briefly send Claude to #1, since the migration would be sizeable in comparison to the normal daily download baseline.
But we can also expect that this would probably be just a blip for a couple of days, as it's unlikely to make much difference in the baseline ratio for the general population.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts
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