The war of words taking place between Anthropic and OpenAI this week was mirrored by the competition in product performance, with the recent release of each company’s respective frontier models. On Thursday, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6, which it claimed “improves on its predecessor’s coding skills”. On the same day, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, which it called “the most capable agentic coding model to date”, placing it neck and neck in the performance race with Anthropic. Early analysis found the two models converging with their latest release.
These model updates came just after the release of industry-specific plugins for Claude Cowork last week. The release of Claude Cowork seems to have caused a meltdown in the public software stock market, with some considering it a watershed moment in the development of general-purpose AI agents, which now demonstrate the ability to “dismantle the business models” of incumbent SaaS companies. Companies like Salesforce have dropped 10% or more in market cap in the last five days, in an acceleration of its 42% drop over the past year. Whether this truly is the “SaaSpocalypse” or markets are overreacting remains an open question. However, not to be outdone, on Thursday, OpenAI released its own general-purpose agentic coworking tool, Frontier, with notable early customers including HP, Intuit, Oracle, and State Farm.
*For more, see our newly updated memo on Anthropic.*
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