Good point. I feel like this does a disservice to ChatGPT -- IIRC even the free tier of Claude points you to Sonnet 4.6 by default, which is magnitudes better than 5.3-instant which has been the default in ChatGPT.

Hence most users will immediately think Claude is smarter, even if their best models are on par.

then again I think the free sonnet 4.6 only allows ~5 requests a day but GPT allows more than 50