Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often

> the only people I hear talking about actually switching away

Opus 5 had really bad writing so I switched to OpenAI, though Opus 5.5 largely addresses that and it's not like them building some Slack integrations (or any other non-core stuff) halts the actual model training in any capacity. For what it's worth, Astra is a pretty good model and for all I know the new Sol will be as well, it's just that it's getting more expensive.

The people who switch back and forth between providers every month are a very small, but loud, minority.

OpenAI did pull ahead in limits and quality for a while. Anthropic took it back with the Opus 5.5 rollout. I maintain subscriptions to both providers and use both daily. I can confirm these differences were real, not "it's just vibes and nobody knows anything".

I would bet that 99% of each company's paying customers either did not notice, or did not care enough to consider changing.

They've definitely lost many experienced devs who can see Anthropic's offerings are insuperior to OpenAI/Codex; I know I am not the only one.

I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.