There’s plenty of straightforward reasons why OpenAI would want to do this, it doesn’t need to be some sort of malicious conspiracy.

I think it’s good PR (particularly since Anthropics actions against OpenCode and Clawdbot were somewhat controversial) + Peter was able to build a hugely popular thing & clearly would be valuable to have on the team building something along the lines of Claude Cowork. I would expect these future products to be much stronger from a security standpoint.

I suspect Anthropic was seeing a huge spike of concurrent model usage at a too fast of a rate that claude code just doesn't do, CC is rather "slow" at api calls per minute. Also lots and lots of cache, the sheer amount of cache that claude does is insane.