The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic intensified this week.
The two companies released dueling new AI models on Thursday and had back-to-back podcast appearances on “TBPN.”
On Thursday, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6, an upgraded model that the company says would improve performance on office productivity and coding tasks, with an expanded “context window” that allows it to work through longer documents and more complex projects in a single session.
Meanwhile, OpenAI punched back with its own new coding-focused model called GPT-5.3-Codex, which the company says runs faster, uses fewer computing resources, and can generate and manage complex software from English instructions. The new version also comes alongside a stand-alone Codex desktop app.
Both Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, and Sholto Douglas, one of Anthropic’s leading researchers, appeared on the “TBPN” podcast in back-to-back chats with show host John Coogan and Jordi Hays.
“I think we will be heading towards a workflow where a lot of people just feel like they’re managing a team of agents,” said Altman. “And as the agents get better, they’ll keep operating at a higher and higher level of abstraction.”
Douglas, who appeared in the subsequent timeslot, told Coogan and Hays that users have been comparing previous Anthropic and OpenAI models, and they have noticed some key differences.
“The OpenAI models were a bit better at trying really, really, really hard on tough problems, but the Anthropic models were much faster and so forth,” Douglas said.
“And so they worked on speed while we worked on making the models much, much better at really, really tough problems,” Douglas added of the Opus 4.6.
The latest release is part of a long-running competition between Anthropic and OpenAI, dating back to 2021, when a group of OpenAI researchers left to form Anthropic, aiming to develop safer and more controlled AI systems.
A big week for Anthropic
This week, Anthropic’s launch of industry-specific plugins triggered a stock market sell-off as Wall Street worried about AI’s impact on software.
Anthropic also took a subtle shot at OpenAI with a series of ads released this week, including one that will air during the Super Bowl.
The ads feature unnamed humanized AIs dropping ads in the middle of their advice, alongside the promise that its model, Claude, will remain ad-free.
OpenAI announced in January that ads are coming to ChatGPT for users of the free version.
Altman subsequently hit back, calling Anthropic “dishonest” and defending ChatGPT as a product that brings AI “to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.” He also clarified that the ads will be “clearly labeled” to differentiate themselves from the chatbot’s answers to queries.
“We are not stupid. We respect our users. We understand that if we did something like what those ads depict, people would rightfully stop using the product,” Altman told the “TBPN” podcast on Thursday.
“Our first principle with ads is that we’re not going to put stuff into the LLM stream,” Altman added. “That would feel crazy dystopic, like a bad sci-fi movie.”
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