I probably wouldn’t say they always had the best model but for years OAI was definitely pushing the limits both on model quality and product offerings. It was not until the last year or so that Anthropic started punching above their weight.
Anthropic's stuff been useful for the last two years I'd say, especially in the beginning of Claude Code, but as soon as the Codex TUI was available, I was daily-driving both of them, literally executing the same prompts for each of them and comparing the final results, and Codex simply writes better code in 9/10 cases (but still not always).
We've been experimenting with "agent harnesses" way before that though, I'm sure the first time I tried building that sort of thing was in 2023 sometime with GPT3, and I'm like 80% confident I tried the same sort of TUI experience as CC from some random user before Claude Code even became public.
1. Less interaction required over long horizon tasks.
2. You actually get the amount of tokens they advertize. It's been an open secret on r/Claude that over the last several months, due to supposed "bugs" in Claude, users on the Max plan have seen over 50% of their tokens used on a single prompt. Super annoying.
3. Really strong image generation capabilities.
That's not to say OpenAI's current generosity will last, but for now I definitely see Codex as the stronger option between the two.
What’s the incentive for Anthropic to pump up the token usage on their top end plan? Is it to move Pro users up to Max? That’s the only plausible idea I can think of.