What about when it decides to ban specific things, like say writing gambling-related applications? Or partner with, say, an auth provider and decides that all Claude-generated user management now goes through their affiliate? Replace auth provider with any backend feature.

Generally, I'm not and never was reliant on any of them to begin with. LLMs are just my rubber duck at best. That said, I never trusted OAI or Anthropic, let alone the absolute security hellhole those agents and harnesses are. With that in mind: everything local. Qwen 3.8 27B is phenomenal, and it runs on pretty much consumer hardware. There is a catch: my mistrust for the above mentioned and knowledge that the rug pull will inevitably happen made me buy an Asus GX10 a little after they came out - they were the cheapest by a country mile and overall 4000 bucks well spent there. For all I care, let OpenAI and Anthropic burn.

All these and many Chinese models are so close in capability anyway that I imagine the price war is gonna continue for a while, good for consumers to get cheap subscription tokens. Will probably be years before the dust settles, and then just switch over to the best value. Something like DeepSeek is more than good enough for most of my work today, just no reason to switch yet while subscriptions tokens are dirt cheap. There is no lock in anyway so no point in worrying about it now. I could literally switch tomorrow and wouldn't miss Anthropic/OpenAI much.

not trying to be glib, but, this is an excellent question for a lab model to churn on for a bit.

it’s not just about what’s changing, but also what you specifically would need or want, and what you can afford to do or buy.

put differently, you’ll get anecdotes here, but what you need and what responders need is likely to differ.

“Best agentic coding harness,” for example. For what end?

I'll think about it if/when it happens - the space changes so quickly that whatever your plan is now, by the time you need the plan, everything will have changed so much that your current plan will be completely irrelevant.

And having to pay more and/or using slightly less capable models isn't a disaster, it's not like you need a frontier model for everything.

This was a more relevant conversation six months, since then OpenAI have been much more competitive on price for top models, Anthropic much less so but they're showing some signs of improvement in the 5.5 releases, and we've had an abundance of cheaper open source models.