OpenAI likes to time their announcements alongside major competitor announcements to suck up some of the hype. (See for instance the announcement of GPT-4o a single day before Google's IO conference)

They were probably sitting on this for a while. That makes me think this is a fairly incremental update for Codex.

GPT 5.1 / Codex already beats Gemini 3 on SWE Bench Verified and Terminal Bench and this pushes the gap further. Seems like a decent improvement.

Anthropic released the Opus 4.1 (basically, a new Opus 4 checkpoint) right around the big GPT-5 release date too, if I remember correctly. At this point, anything goes to stay relevant.

That’s how the game is played. We should be grateful for all the competition that is driving these improvements, not whinging about the realities of what companies have to do to contest each other’s position.

Gemini is eating their lunch, and OpenAI knows it.

it's really getting old