Not only that, but since the release of 5.4 and 5.3 codex I've been running them in parallel and I've been let down by Opus 4.6 with maximum thinking way more than I've been let down with OpenAI models.

In fact I'm more and more inclined to run my own benchmarks from now on, because I seriously distrust those I see online.

Even if the benchmarks are indeed valid, they just don't reflect my use cases, usages and ability to navigate my projects and my dependencies.

imho they're mostly better at a subset of different tasks. I find codex to be better at reasoning through bugs and reviewing code when compared to Opus, but for writing code I find Claude a lot better.

Maybe that's just CLAUDE.md and memory causing the difference of course.

As a matter of preference however I like the way Claude Code works just a lot better, instructing it to work with parallel subagents in work trees etc. just matches the way I think these things should work I guess.

My impression as well, especially since 5.2 which I felt was on par or better than Opus 4.5

> Have they announced this?

No and indeed they have said they never do this at all.