Even if you don't want to use open models, you should cheer for them anyway because it puts the American frontier labs' feet to the flames. This competition is awesome for us consumers.
Yes, thanks for this, Deepseek! (I did start using the Deepseek harness and v4 flash due to the crazy low usage limits on sol and I'm quite pleased to have discovered how capable both of those are -- both have now earned a place in my agentic workflow).
I did try to use Chinese open models, but for my production work they simply couldn't cope at all; both GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4 went into infinite loop and wasted my tokens until my OpenRouter wallet reached 0; good thing I didn't enable the auto topup. US models, by contrast, breezed past them.
Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price , in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time wasted on thinking.
So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.
As far as consumers are concerned, I feel blindly shilling for anyone purely for ideological reasons are quite meaningless, especially when it comes to open/close source and US/China rivalry. I have no obligation to support "open source/weight" or the "underdogs" just because they are so. We only want things that work, and at a cheap price.
I’ve been using deepseek and it works great for my problems. An expensive day is when I spend $7 in tokens, and that takes lots of queries. Openrouter doesn’t give you the cache discount I think, which is really important.
I hope these type of dismissive comments stop in HN. OpenAI have been reducing prices since for ever so these kinda things are really the consequence of finding efficiencies and passing it down due to competition and increasing demand.
> But it seems Claude code is too strong of a brand
Nah. I switched away from Claude Code to Codex recently. It's refreshing how to-the-point 5.6-Sol is out of the box, and there's only so many load-bearing seams and honest takes I can handle from Opus. And additionally, yeah as you called out, the Codex Max plan is substantially more generous with tokens than Anthropic is with Claude Max and Opus/Fable.
So in other words, right now you have free choice between Claude and Codex and developers are choosing Claude of their own free will, but you want management to come in and force people to use Codex instead?
If it’s so much better, developers will switch. Lots of devs at my company have switched recently. But plenty of others have stayed on Claude.
I don’t think one is clearly better in every way right now. Or at least not better enough to make people want to learn and set up a new tool.
I believe the 1M context window can be configured in Codex (config file edit). The price per token increases when >256k though, but it can be useful when compaction at-that-moment would be detrimental.
Not sure if I do anything wrong but Codex with Sol made such slow progress on my work, I iterated several days to do a redesign of my UI and it kept making small piecemeal changes then stopping and asking me for confirmation again and again even though I tried to get it to get bigger chunks done. Switched to Claude Code and had the redesign done in a short session within a day.
Maybe just the system prompt or my settings or the harness? Anyway, it seemed to me Codex was just deliberately being overcareful and wasting tons of tokens for a low-risk CSS / HTML refactoring with very minor breakage risk, while Claude got the job done immediately.
What's the deal with anthropic? Their models aren't better. They're just multiple times more expensive. We're about to disable all anthropic models because of the colleagues who waste 15$ on a opus call to write a markdown file.
They were first to offer a frontier model which also meets enterprise requirements (i.e. not training on or retaining on customer data, able to purchase tokens through AWS and GCP instead of having to onboard a new vendor). They did so with a proprietary harness, which creates friction for teams inside enterprises to move (can't just install another harness - your IT org has to approve and configure another harness for you). In particular, they were the first to make their model acceptable for defense contractors, and defense spending is a huge market. (An F-35 costs $30k-40k per hour to run, you think an aerospace company notices $10k of API usage per month?)
> is altman playing 4d chess or something I'm not aware of?
Anthropic just removed a discount on Fable, while people are simultaneously getting sick of reading fable and opus talking about “the load bearing texture” and “color of the blanket”. It’s become excruciatingly painful to read the output during coding sessions.
My personal best case scenario is that LLMs are commodotizing and that the "We'll rule the world with our frontier models" vision of OpenAI and Anthropic is not working out.
They can and probably will still be very successful but what they pitched so far is not going to work if their is any meaningful competition not too far behind.
But who knows. VC money allows them to try a lot of stuff before their eventual IPO.
It seems that they lack a holistic strategy. All these decisions probably make sense in isolation but together they create a huge mess.
Given the increased pressure from open weight models (still 6 months behind but now more than good enough for most use cases) the frontier labs really have to step up their game.
Switching is as easy as typing /model in most harnesses so there's effectively zero moat.
Or maybe… you know.. their margins are that high and by passing down the efficiency gains to consumer they can get market share and induce more demand?
“GPT-5.6 Sol is available at promotional pricing, 50% off standard rates, through September 3, 2026. The default tier is $2.00 per 1M input tokens, $0.20 per 1M cached input tokens, $2.50 per 1M cache write tokens, and $10.00 per 1M output tokens. The long context tier is $4.00 per 1M input tokens, $0.40 per 1M cached input tokens, $5.00 per 1M cache write tokens, and $15.00 per 1M output tokens.”
Their X post[1] indicated that they've been trying to combat reselling subscription plans via token API gateways and at the same time many, many people, myself included, have seen a drastic drop in available weekly capacity for the same amount of queries/tokens, all else being equal. So they may be trying to make subscriptions and API access more equal to each other from both ends.
It is absurd for the Chat Latest (chat-latest) model to now be pricier than Sol. For those who prefer a non-thinking instant model, it is the model of choice, not Sol.
Also, they have done nothing for the TTS model which remains ridiculously priced.
Probably even higher because openai and anthropic undoubtably have the lowest cost per token generated, especially with cerebras being able to serve a million tokens every 16 minutes.
Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price , in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time wasted on thinking.
So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day.
As far as consumers are concerned, I feel blindly shilling for anyone purely for ideological reasons are quite meaningless, especially when it comes to open/close source and US/China rivalry. I have no obligation to support "open source/weight" or the "underdogs" just because they are so. We only want things that work, and at a cheap price.
Until the IT managers and CFOs cut budget hard, Claude will live rent free in heads of all developers
OpenAI should attack the CIO and CFOs stat
At my company we have unlimited codex and claude, still people stick to gimped claude code
Nah. I switched away from Claude Code to Codex recently. It's refreshing how to-the-point 5.6-Sol is out of the box, and there's only so many load-bearing seams and honest takes I can handle from Opus. And additionally, yeah as you called out, the Codex Max plan is substantially more generous with tokens than Anthropic is with Claude Max and Opus/Fable.
If it’s so much better, developers will switch. Lots of devs at my company have switched recently. But plenty of others have stayed on Claude.
I don’t think one is clearly better in every way right now. Or at least not better enough to make people want to learn and set up a new tool.
I can understand the fatigue - but as of today, for most thing I would say Sol is better.
If the opened up the 1M context in Codex, it would be unrivalled.
Enterprise may have a bit more difficulty context switching. Pun intended.
And everyone else is close enough in terms of quality, their tiny advantage if any is insufficient. Let's not even talk speed.
OpenAI is competing with chinese models.
Maybe just the system prompt or my settings or the harness? Anyway, it seemed to me Codex was just deliberately being overcareful and wasting tons of tokens for a low-risk CSS / HTML refactoring with very minor breakage risk, while Claude got the job done immediately.
pushing your API subscriber base towards a competitor with an exclusive 50%, openrouter, the other day ...
slashing paying codex subscriber usage limits to the point that many are cancelling long term contracts they've had with the company ...
is altman playing 4d chess or something I'm not aware of?
because from the outside, each of these moves looks pretty bad on the face of it
How do you know they don’t?
> is altman playing 4d chess or something I'm not aware of?
Anthropic just removed a discount on Fable, while people are simultaneously getting sick of reading fable and opus talking about “the load bearing texture” and “color of the blanket”. It’s become excruciatingly painful to read the output during coding sessions.
Maybe it’s just good marketing.
I believe Astra is the next model beyond Sol? They used it for https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
They can and probably will still be very successful but what they pitched so far is not going to work if their is any meaningful competition not too far behind.
But who knows. VC money allows them to try a lot of stuff before their eventual IPO.
Given the increased pressure from open weight models (still 6 months behind but now more than good enough for most use cases) the frontier labs really have to step up their game.
Switching is as easy as typing /model in most harnesses so there's effectively zero moat.
What’s 4d chess in this?
1. https://xcancel.com/thsottiaux/status/2090675027670978569#m
Also, they have done nothing for the TTS model which remains ridiculously priced.
https://x.com/openai/status/2090885187634905500