I just don’t see how they can build a moat.

I don’t feel like paying for a max level subscription, but am trying out MCP servers across OpenAI, Anthropic etc so I pay for the access to test them.

When my X hour token allotment runs out on one model I jump to the next closing Codex and opening Claude code or whatever together with altering my prompting a tiny bit to fit the current model.

Being so extremely fungible should by definition be a race to zero margins and about zero profit being made in the long run.

I suppose they can hope to make bank the next 6-12 months but that doesn’t create a longterm sustainable company.

I guess they can try building context to lock me in by increasing the cost to switch - but this is today broken by me every 3-4 prompts clearing the context because I know the output will be worse if I keep going.

The money right now is in company subscriptions. If I went to my employer and said I can save an hour of work per day with a Claude Code subscription (and they have any sense at all) they should laugh at that $200/month price tag and pay up in an instant.

The challenge is definitely in the competition though. GPT-5-Codex offered _very_ real competition for Claude Sonnet 4 / Opus 4 / Opus 4.1 - for a few weeks OpenAI were getting some of those subscribers back until Sonnet 4.5 landed. I expect that will happen frequently.