I actually heard the opposite, the folks at Anthropic felt pretty confident they were ahead after the Astra release because it wasn't as good as they were expecting.

I don't know why anyone was saying that when Anthropic clearly knew Opus 5.5 significantly outperformed Astra at the time of Astra's launch. I think it might be a good exercise to go back and find out who called Astra a "gut punch" and lower your credence in their future claims.