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I work at a dinosaur of a company, so I can't speak to this directly, but a friend of mine that I recently mentioned gave me an update the other day. They've gone from "you must burn as many tokens as possible to maximize your performance review" to "we must use our token budget wisely."
The timing is interesting. It happened right around the same time Anthropic started putting the screws on its customer base with increased token usage and tighter rate limits.
I really feel like the company that sits on a "good enough" model and aggressively cost cuts is going to win this particular war.
That would be OpenAI. Claude is a 2026 fad and will be over soon.
There are some Chinese contenders within striking distance as well. GLM-5.1 is open weight and seems to perform somewhere between Opus 4.5 and 4.6. It's pretty incredible that there is open weight competition that's less than six months behind frontier state of the art.
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