Anthropic's Opus 4.6 and OpenAI's Codex: New AI Models Compete

Anthropic has just released their latest top-of-the-line model, Opus 4.6. And I think most importantly, this is a huge upgrade to their most popular product, which is Claude Code. Now fifteen minutes after they made this big announcement, OpenAI immediately dropped their own competitor to this to this AI model with their own update. OpenAI is doing a whole bunch of new uh features to try to get to the enterprise users that use anthropic. There's been a ton of beef

online over the last couple days from open a from Anthropic running a ad and allegedly they're gonna have a Super Bowl ad that is coming after OpenAI and Sam Altman is replying on Twitter. There's so much drama that we're gonna break down in this episode today and show some of the really cool use cases of the latest models.

So there's a lot to get into. Before we do that, I wanted to mention if you want to test out any of the latest models from Anthropic, from OpenAI, from Google, from Grok, from all of the top companies, including Eleven Labs for audio and tons of really cool image models.

Go check out aibox.ai. We will let you access all the top AI models in one place for 20 bucks a month and you get all of your files in one place. You don't have to have tons of different subscriptions. And you can also vibe build tools by just explaining what type of tool you want.

And our AI builder will link together different models. So there's a bunch of cool different things you can do, but I think a lot of people love the fact that you get access to all of the AI models in one place. I'll link it in the description. It is aibox.ai. Okay, let's get into what has just been released. I think prior to this kind of Opus four point six, Opus four point five came out in November of last year. And so I think

And right now Anthropic is obviously trying to get the the reach of their model to to kind of get out of a small segment of users, which is mostly developers and professional and enterprise. Now, not that a small segment is a bad thing, like they're not making a lot of money. They're making an insane amount of money because

Most of their users are paying hundreds of dollars. The API credits are crazy when you're when you're talking about developers. Um, personally, I pay hundreds of dollars a month. uh in in you know clawed credits to to for development and and to build things. So it definitely is making a lot more money than just my twenty dollar a month OpenAI chat GPT subscription, but they're trying to get a broader reach. I think one of the biggest additions is what

They are now calling quote unquote agent. teams. So rather than just relying on a single agent to work through different, you know, a task sequentially, agent teams allowed really large jobs to be broken into smaller pieces that multiple agents, according to Anthropic, can then tackle at the same time. This is one of their biggest updates. Uh just here's what they said about it.

They said, quote, instead of one agent working through tasks sequentially, you can split the work across multiple agents, each owning its piece and coordinating directly with the others. This is uh Anthropic was saying this in a big press release, Scott Weiss, who's uh Anthropic's head of product. basically said that this feature is like having a really talented team of humans working together by segmenting responsibilities.

So the different agents can actually coordinate in parallel and then they can move much faster. Agent teams are currently available as a research preview for API users and subscribers. And so this new Opus four point five also is gonna be introducing some really big context windows uh that have been expanded. Now this is something that I think a lot of people have used kind of as a as a leverage point, uh

f like classically or like famously anthropic was had a bigger context window than OpenAI for many years when ChatGPT first came out and that's why a lot of people would use it. And this is I think basically the first use case for myself with Anthropic, why I was originally using it was It was just a much bigger context window for things and then of course OpenAI kinda opened them up and then Google came out with a massive context window. Um

Because of this, Anthropic has come out swinging. Their new models now support up to a million tokens of context, which is what Google famously did with Gemini that got it a lot of usage.

And this is matching what Enthropic already offers with Sonnet four and four point five. Um so that really massive memory makes it much easier to work with kind of huge code bases, large documents and and It lets you do a lot more complex multi-step workflows just with a single kind of in one single conversation, which is really cool.

So Anthropic is also deepening Cloud's integration with everyday productivity tools. There was a post on Bloomberg that said uh basically uh the SAS crash in the market that's been happening over the last couple of days is due to anthropic releasing um some of these deeper integrations with a bunch of

SaaS tools and people are realizing maybe we don't even need the SaaS products at all. Maybe uh Anthropic and Claude and what they're doing and some of these tools that they're replacing because they came up with a bunch of different tools, are crashing the markets, basically, because people are going to stop paying for some of these tools. So

With Opus 4.5, Claude now is directly inside of PowerPoint as a side panel. Previously, users could ask Claude to generate a presentation, but then you still have to go export it. You had to edit it and it was kind of a separate file, which was a pain.

Now your presentations are gonna be built and you can actually go to find them and refine them directly inside of PowerPoint with Claude's assistance. So that's a cool feature. Um in addition, I mean I have the Claude uh I have the Claude uh Google Chrome extension which you know, is is a side panel and if I was on PowerPoint I could tell it to go and make edits and it could just like take over my screen and do that. So that's also uh kind of a cool feature.

According to Anthropoc, all of these changes are trying to basically show how Opus has evolved beyond just kind of its original niche, which was developers, what started as a model which was basically known for like software development has now grown into something that can do a lot more it can support a lot more people and doing a lot more different professional tasks.

Uh here's what they recently said. They said we noticed a lot of people who are not professional software developers using Claud Code primarily because it was a really amazing engine to do tasks. Um, they said that Anthropic has now seen adoption, not just from engineers, but from a lot of product managers, a lot of financial analysts, a lot of professionals in a lot of different industries.

Now the competition is definitely heating up. Anthropic isn't the only one going after the development area. OpenAI is trying to really go pitch heavily for. I've recently been testing out Codex, which is a tool that

OpenAI has you know they've they've kind of had this codex code model for a while, but they recently came out with a Mac um app that I downloaded and they've been playing around with. Uh, they're trying to compete with Claude Code. And what's interesting is in this brand new release that Anthropic did. Um apparently OpenAI and Anthropic were scheduled to release their new coding models at the exact same time. Anthropic bumped it up by fifteen minutes to beat OpenAI to the punt. Um and so

after, you know, Anthropic did this whole release, fifteen minutes later, uh GPT five point three Codex was launched. So OpenIS says that this new model is gonna turn Codex from a tool that can write and review code into one that can handle almost anything developers uh do on a computer, including professionals as well. They said that after they tested a bunch of against a bunch of different like internal benchmarks, they say, I mean this is their claim that GPT 5.3 codec

can build, quote, highly functional, complex games and applications from scratch over the course of days. Um open AI right now is saying that their model runs about twenty five percent faster than GPT five point two. And they also said that this is the first model that they have created that was used like essentially they use this a ton to help them debug and evaluate itself as they were building it. So they were using, you know, GPT five point two to develop GPT five point three.

um, which is a big deal for them. I think the timing definitely wasn't an accident opening open AI and Anthropic, right? Releasing these things fifteen minutes apart and really open AI was trying to release at the same time to try to steal some of their thunder.

OpenAI right now is very ambitious, but it's also looking farther beyond coding. Uh just this week they said uh they also unveiled OpenAI Frontier, which is an end-to-end platform designed to help enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents. Basically, Frontier is an open platform, meaning that companies can manage agents built in outside of OpenAI's ecosystem as well as ones that are built inside of it, which is kind of cool.

With Frontier, different businesses can connect agents to external data and applications. And then they can kind of define what those agents are allowed to access and they can limit what actions they can take. Opening eye says that the system is modeled after how companies manage human employees. Um and how that kind of competes with onboarding processes and feedback loops, which are intended to try to improve agent performance over time.

OpenAI also said uh, you know, they're they're highlighted a bunch of different customers that are using this. They say HP, Oracle, State Farm, Uber. All of those are using Frontier and apparently, um, you know, loving it. Uh you know, if you this is from according to OpenAI.

Um, they said that the pricing hasn't been disclosed and they haven't really commented on any sort of costs associated with this, which is interesting because it's I don't know, it's like an announcement, but you kinda wanna know what what what the uh damage is gonna be. the whole agent management platforms I think have really become very important for these agent these AI companies right now. Uh agents are just surging in how useful they are. And, you know, even since twenty twenty four.

Salesforce launched their own product, which is Agent Force back in 2024. I think there's a lot of other people that are um using tools like Langchain and Crew AI that also have raised a ton of venture funding to kind of compete in that space.

And in December, Gartner described agent management platforms as both quote the most valuable real estate in AI and also basically a really important piece of infrastructure for AI adoption. I think if you look at that and you kind of look at that context, OpenAI kind of making this big push into agent management.

uh early this year is not very surprising. They've made, you know, the enterprise adoption a huge focus this year. They already have some really big partnerships with ServiceNow and Snowflake that they've announced. So I think if OpenAI hopes to become kind of the long term force in the enterprise market,

Frontier looks like a really good step in that direction. And of course, there's a lot of competition. I mean, we're looking at anthropic, we're looking at open AI. There's just everyone's battling right now to be the platform that leads agents, the platform that's, you know, leading developers. I think that um the competition is fierce.

but it's interesting to see these two players kind of compete against each other. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed this episode, uh it'd mean the world to me if you left a rating review. Honestly, it just helps to show out a ton to get found by people. And I always love to hear what you think.

Um if you enjoyed an episode or if you know this is something that's useful for you or if you'd like me to cover different ideas, topics, genres, like let me know in the comments. Um and in the as a sh is a review on the show. Helps a ton. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you guys all in the next episode. As always, make sure to check out AIBox.ai to get access to all of the best models in one place.