To be clear here, I use both models and they absolutely have their own use cases. I have had a $20/month ChatGPT plan since its release in 2022, and upgraded my Claude plan to the same when Claude Code released. After seeing the significant edge opus had over the earlier gpt models in coding I was more than willing to shell out $100/month for my max plan (kinda funny that 12 months later there's no way I would even pay for models of that quality).
Fable made me certain I would stay with that decision on its initial release. GPT 5.6 made me reconsider, and OpenAI's decision to remove 5 hour limits yesterday ("temporarily", lets hope it's as temporary as Fable usage as been) has pretty much sealed the deal.
I intentionally gave both models the same vague prompt in a fresh session to review my codebase, as I'm nearing the final stages of production of my project:
"Can you find anything at all thats still unoptimized, incorrect, can be improved, should be added, hygeine issues, or just general suggestions? im aware this is vague, its intentionally so, but i still want you to be targeted/optimized in how you fan out."
Fable 5 Medium used 7 subagents, around 1 million tokens, and 65% 5 hour/6% weeky (12% of fable!!) on my $100/month 5x max plan limit.
GPT 5.6 Sol Medium used 3 subagents, around 300k tokens, and 10% of my $20/month weekly limit (5 hour limits are gone).
Codex returned more quickly and was more economical, while producing an output of essentially the same quality. Each model found its own issues with my repo which is why multi-model systems are important for agentic development, however, if I wished to run a second pass of this calibre I would receive a session limit from Claude, resulting in my cache to expire by the time I could continue it, whereas on a Codex plan that is 5x less expensive, I have the freedom to run multiple more audits and verification passes. Not to mention the 5 free resets I have in my back pocket, so at this point I might as well upgrade to a $100/month Codex subscription and immediately get $500 in value from it (which I'll be doing soon).
This isn't to say use one or the other, this isn't crying out to cancel your Anthropic subscription and jump ship to OpenAI. The competition is real and Anthropic could do something just as crazy as dropping 5 hour limits next week to get us to stay. This is to say that as someone who has seen the edge Claude models had over the last 12 months while utilizing both companies' products, this latest release has significantly closed the gap and unless Anthropic starts giving consumer usage a bigger priority, they will lose the loyalty they worked hard to build. Not to mention an enterprise user who weighs cost, efficiency, reliability, and quality--the clients and companies I work with are all using or moving to ChatGPT plans as on a larger scale economics take priority. Anthropic may still slightly hold the top on the quality bar, but that isn't enough to win the market share they need at this stage of rapid model progression.
If you read my rant, I thank you. If you want to argue, I welcome it. I love these tools, and I love what they've enabled me to create. I think the people who play teams on this stuff are stupid, we are in the golden era of usage where we benefit from true capitalistic competition and you should be taking full advantage of it.
edit: had 2021 up top meant 2022 lmao