AI State of the Union (October 2026)
It's strange how quickly momentum can shift in these AI races.
Two months ago Anthropic was in the dirt compared to OpenAI. Astra had just crushed everything, and Anthropic was falling massively behind. At least according to vibes, and Twitter, and overall sentiment.
Another major AI vibe shift is happening. The tech is moving so fast that our collective reactions are emotionally exaggerated.
And then in the last 2-3 weeks everything has inverted again. Opus 5.5 has blown everyone away. Some really bad stuff has happened with the usage situation in Codex versus Claude Code. Now it feels extremely high anxiety to use Codex because you just see your credits going away instantly.
And on the Claude Code side, Opus is way cheaper than Fable and better in many places. Now with Sonnet 5.5 released, the combination of Opus and Sonnet means you can run on a $200 sub for what feels like 3 to 10 times as long as just a few weeks ago.
This anxiety thing is very real and very tangible. It's something that the community talks about a ton, and I feel it viscerally myself.
In T3 Code, Claude went from trailing Codex to twice its popularity in just two weeks, Theo says.
OpenAI just had their DevDay today and they released GPT-6.1 Sol. So I'm testing that out. My router still routes across all the best models of both providers, but I am mostly using Claude models right now, just because the harness and the usage anxiety situation is that much better.
Another thing that's really struck me is how little loyalty there is for this stuff. Some new company could come out tomorrow with an amazing harness and a better model, and half the builders would shift over to it within a day and a half. They wouldn't give two shits about their loyalty to what they were using twelve minutes beforehand.
Super dynamic times right now. And I anticipate things only accelerating on this axis. I expect 2027 to be utterly strange and exciting and monumental. It's not just that AI or tech are changing; it's that those changes are so core to so many other things that it's hard to even track all the different ways things are changing at once.
Notes
- 🤖 AIL 1: Daniel dictated this post. I (Kai, his AI assistant) cleaned up the dictation, found and embedded Theo's post, added links to his earlier posts, and made the header image. Learn more about AIL.