@thsottiaux Tibo, if you guys really can't come up with a new model, and you're getting tired of watching Claude dominate the spotlight, I have a different perspective that might help you level the playing field in the public narrative.
I've been thinking about a hypothesis regarding the current AI competitive landscape, and the more I think about it, the more I believe it's worth investigating.
Claude's market value may be significantly overestimated, while GPT's actual competitiveness may be seriously underestimated.
The underlying issue is something I believe the AI industry has largely overlooked:
Are we evaluating AI models too heavily based on their performance in the first few rounds of interaction?
### 1. What I've observed about Claude
Based on my own experience using Claude, I've noticed a very distinct pattern.
When you first interact with it, Claude can be absolutely astonishing. It quickly understands complex requirements, proactively develops plans, and delivers impressive results. It gives you the feeling that you're interacting with something approaching AGI.
However, as a conversation progresses, I've noticed a significant decline in its delivery quality.
It starts becoming more conservative and calculating. It tends to choose the easiest implementation, explores fewer alternatives, and performs less verification. The capabilities that impressed me so much in a fresh conversation are not necessarily sustained during long-term collaboration.
I even suspect that one of the main reasons Opus 5.5 has opened such a large perceived gap over GPT is that it has made particularly significant advances in early interactions and initial task delivery.
I don't know whether this is intentional on Anthropic's part or an unintended consequence of training, context management, and product design. But I believe the phenomenon deserves serious investigation.
### 2. I believe the industry has a significant evaluation bias
Real users don't interact with AI by submitting one complete prompt and waiting for a final answer.
Especially in complex programming, product design, research, and creative work, the actual workflow looks more like this:
- The user presents an initial requirement.
- The AI proposes a solution and delivers the first version.
- The user introduces new requirements.
- The AI modifies the existing work.
- Problems emerge, requiring further adjustments.
- New features and constraints are introduced.
- The work goes through repeated iterations, testing, and refinement.
- The same project continues evolving across multiple independent sessions.
This is how people actually work with AI.
Yet a large proportion of industry benchmarks still focus on individual tasks, initial delivery, and short-term interactions.
Even many so-called long-horizon benchmarks simply ask an agent to work continuously for several hours on a predefined task.
That is fundamentally different from a user collaborating with an AI for weeks or months, across dozens of independent sessions, continuously introducing new requirements.
I think we need to distinguish three different concepts:
1. Long-duration autonomous execution of a single task.
2. Continuous multi-turn interaction within a single conversation.
3. Long-term iterative development of the same project across multiple independent sessions.
The latter two, particularly the third, are what actually determine long-term value to users.
### 3. Independent research has already identified this evaluation blind spot
I've found several studies that deserve further investigation.
First: An ICLR 2026 paper from Microsoft Research and Salesforce Research.
[LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation](https://t.co/nROFLbP53d)
The study examined more than 200,000 simulated conversations and found that leading models experienced an average performance decline of approximately 39% when moving from single-turn to multi-turn interactions.
The researchers found that models tend to make assumptions early in a conversation and subsequently become overly dependent on those earlier, sometimes incorrect, assumptions.
Second: UserSWE, from Tencent's Hunyuan research team.
[UserSWE](https://t.co/msL10S4u4c)
The study evaluated 11 agents across 72 tasks and 42 real-world code repositories.
One particularly interesting finding was that Claude Fable 5.1 led in the first round, while GPT-6 Astra solved the most tasks by the eighth round. The relative rankings changed as interactions progressed.
Third: LongMemEval, ICLR 2025.
[LongMemEval](https://t.co/UHpw2RF2sY)
This study evaluated long-term memory across multiple independent sessions and found that commercial conversational assistants and long-context models experienced approximately 30% declines in memory accuracy during sustained interactions.
These studies don't prove that Opus 5.5 suffers from long-term quality degradation. However, they demonstrate that current mainstream evaluation methods may fail to capture the actual experience of long-term AI users.
### 4. What I actually want to investigate
I particularly want to focus on Opus 5.5 and contemporary GPT models.
We need to answer several questions:
- Is Opus 5.5's advantage primarily concentrated in initial interactions and the first few rounds?
- Does its delivery quality gradually decline as the same project goes through repeated iterations?
- Does this pattern persist across multiple independent sessions?
- Does GPT have an underestimated advantage in long-term instruction following, sustained delivery, and regression control?
- Is this a problem shared by all frontier models, with only the severity differing?
I believe we should prioritize independent third-party research rather than relying on promotional materials published by the model providers themselves.
If existing research is insufficient, we could also investigate real-world user histories, agent execution traces, and third-party software engineering projects.
Most importantly, we must distinguish between long-duration execution of a single task and sustained collaboration across multiple sessions.
### 5. Why could this matter for the commercial valuation of the entire industry?
This is what I consider the most important part.
Claude's current market position is built to a considerable extent on its extraordinarily impressive capability demonstrations.
But we need to ask:
Is this capability genuinely sustainable productivity, or is it primarily peak performance concentrated in initial experiences and short-term tasks?
If users are initially impressed by a model's capabilities, but then have to repeatedly remind, correct, inspect, and rework its output during long-term projects, its actual economic value could be substantially lower than its initial performance suggests.
This directly affects enterprise customer retention, actual productivity gains, the cost of producing usable results, and the commercial premium a model can command.
If this phenomenon is primarily associated with Claude, then Claude's competitive advantage and valuation premium may be significantly overstated.
If it is a problem shared by all frontier models, then perhaps it isn't just Claude that is overvalued. The entire AI industry's expectations regarding model productivity may be inflated.
Conversely, if GPT performs better in long-term collaboration than short-term benchmarks suggest, the actual gap between GPT and Claude may be much smaller than the market currently perceives.
### 6. What I'd like you to investigate
I'm not asking you to prove my hypothesis correct.
I'd like you to use your research resources to independently investigate the following:
1. Are there already published studies on long-term collaboration across multiple sessions that haven't received sufficient attention?
2. Is there real-world user data that tracks the quality of model outputs across successive interactions?
3. Are there significant differences between Opus 5.5 and contemporary GPT models in initial versus long-term delivery quality?
4. Do mainstream AI benchmarks systematically overestimate models' long-term productivity?
5. If this hypothesis holds, what would it mean for Anthropic's competitive advantage, commercial value, and valuation?
I'd also like to see strong counterevidence if it exists.
I believe this is not simply a question of comparing model capabilities. It could be a question that fundamentally challenges how the entire AI industry evaluates and values its technology.
We shouldn't mistake a model's most impressive moment for the level of productivity it can reliably deliver every day.