Claude/Anthropic is more focused on productivity (Coding, Spreadsheets, Reports). ChatGPT seems more focused on general-purpose LLM (Research, Cooking, Writing, Image Generation).

Makes sense that MS would partner with Anthropic since their tool-use for productivity (Claude Code) seems superior. I personally rarely code with ChatGPT, almost strictly Claude.

Some people might be surprised that MS would pick the product with the best technological fit rather than the one they already have a deep business and financial relationship with.

Surely Microsoft's expertise these days is in cross-selling passable but not best-in-class products to enterprises who already pay for Microsoft products.

It says something about how they view the AI coding market, or perhaps the level of the gap between Anthropic and OpenAI here, that they've gone the other way.

I've been happy with Anthropic models. I also have been using the Google models more, with decent results. The Copilot/OpenAI models don't seem to be as good as a rule of thumb, can't explain exactly why.

Overall, I think Google has a better breadth of knowledge encoded, but Anthropic gets work done better.

This has been largely my experience as well. Claude does way better with coding while ChatGPT does better with general questions.

I like perplexity's deep research model which is based on deepseek i think. i use that for most kind of writing, discussion, research, etc. where I need some kind of feedback. Claude seems to go crazy sometimes when you ask it to do the same task. Whereas for coding, Claude Code is obviously better than everything else under the sun.

I'd argue that Anthropic still has a hard edge on creativity for things like emulating people's comments.

I've fed into several models my past reddit comments (with the comments it's responding to) and asked it to duplicate the style. Claude has always been the only thing that comes even close to original responses that even I think would be exactly my response, wording and all.

GPT or Gemini will just borrow snippets from the example text and just smoosh it together to make semi-coherent points. Scratch that. They're coherent, but they're just unmistakably not from me.

GPT-5 is pretty decent nowadays, but Claude 4 Sonnet is superior in most cases. GPT beats it in cost and usable context window when something quite complex comes up to plan top-down.

Are there any open models that compete with Claude in its tool use capabilities for complex tasks?

Feels like an area where we could use more competition...