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Perspective
Foundation ModelsDeveloper Tools & DevOps

The Frontier Model Wars Continue

February 7, 2026|2 min

A perspective from Contrary Research.

Dot-grid line chart: a grey area slides down while a blue line climbs across it to finish near the top
  • Perspective
  • Authors1
  • Related Companies2

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.*

Authors

  • Sachin Maini

    Senior Editor

    See articles

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Authors

  • Sachin Maini

    Senior Editor

    Sachin Maini is Senior Editor of Contrary Research, where he's led the publication of 500+ company-specific reports and dozens of industry deep dives. Prior to Contrary, Sachin led content for NFX, publishing several seminal essays on network effects for the firm.

    See articles

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    Anthropic has developed its own method to train and deploy “Constitutional AI”, or large language models (LLMs) with embedded values that can be controlled by humans.

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  • OpenAI logo
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    OpenAI

    OpenAI has become a central driver of global AI adoption, evolving from a research lab into one of the most widely used model and application providers.

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