Scale And Strategy
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This is Scale And Strategy, the daily newsletter bringing you insights and alpha from seemingly boring corners of the BizOps world (that others overlook).
Here’s what we got for you today:
- Claude Opus 4.6 Closes the Gap on OpenAI’s Multi-Agent Push
- ChatGPT Is Losing Ground. Grok and Google Are Closing In.
Claude Opus 4.6 Closes the Gap on OpenAI’s Multi-Agent Push
As the industry waits for Claude Sonnet 5, Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.6, a move that largely neutralizes OpenAI’s recent lead in multi-agent systems.
On Thursday, Anthropic announced the latest update to its Claude model family, highlighting stronger coding and review capabilities, improved task planning, and the ability to sustain longer-running agentic workflows.
Alongside the model launch, Anthropic introduced a new feature called Agent Teams, which allows users to deploy multiple agents that autonomously divide work and operate in parallel. The functionality closely mirrors OpenAI’s Codex, which introduced multi-agent capabilities earlier this week.
Claude Code has already seen rapid adoption over the past few months. Some investors have even cited its rise as a factor in recent software stock sell-offs, driven by concerns that AI-powered “vibe coding” could reduce the need for traditional software vendors. OpenAI’s Codex raised the stakes by extending this concept from a single coding agent to coordinated teams of agents. With Opus 4.6, Anthropic now offers comparable capabilities.
Beyond agent teams, Anthropic says Opus 4.6 delivers improvements across a range of work-oriented tasks, including financial analysis, research, document creation, and agentic search. The model is also designed to handle large codebases more reliably and to support autonomous multitasking when used within Claude Cowork.
Opus 4.6 is the first model in the Opus line to feature a 1 million token context window, and it achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks, including Terminal-Bench 2.0 for agentic coding, Humanity’s Last Exam, and GDPval-AA for finance and legal evaluation.
Anthropic noted one trade-off in its release: the model’s more deliberate reasoning can increase cost and latency on simpler tasks, even as it improves performance on more complex problems.
Alex Albert, head of Claude relations at Anthropic, described the launch on X as “a watershed moment for AI becoming a real working partner for people who spend their days in spreadsheets, slide decks, and long docs.”
The people who had early access to Opus 4.6 ahead of launch and did not observe a clear step-change in output quality compared to the previous version. That said, the prior model was already highly capable, and the update did not degrade the experience. Any meaningful differences may only emerge under heavy stress testing, particularly in complex coding and reasoning workflows, which the team plans to continue evaluating.
Major model providers face constant pressure to release increasingly powerful systems to outpace competitors, maintain claims of state-of-the-art performance, and satisfy demanding users. With Opus 4.6, Anthropic appears to be responding to that pressure, especially as anticipation builds for Sonnet 5 and OpenAI accelerates its enterprise push with multi-agent tooling. While the update strengthens Claude’s position in agentic and deep research use cases, it may represent an incremental rather than transformative upgrade for users focused on everyday tasks.
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ChatGPT Is Losing Ground. Grok and Google Are Closing In.
ChatGPT still leads, but the gap is shrinking fast.
Among daily U.S. mobile users, ChatGPT’s share fell from 69.1% in Jan 2025 to 45.3% in Jan 2026, per Apptopia. Over the same period, Gemini climbed from 14.7% to 25.1%, while Grok jumped from 1.6% to 15.2%.
The overall chatbot market is still booming, up 152% year over year, and ChatGPT continues to post strong downloads. But dominance is no longer guaranteed.
Web traffic tells the same story. Similarweb shows ChatGPT visits rising from 3.8B to 5.7B over the year. Gemini, meanwhile, exploded from 267.7M to 2B.
Bottom line:
- ChatGPT is still #1, but the lead is thinning.
- Gemini and Grok are scaling fast, especially on the web.
- Market growth is slowing as competition heats up.
Analysts also flagged a small dip in ChatGPT traffic in late 2025, while Gemini surged. Early January hints at a ChatGPT rebound, but Gemini’s momentum hasn’t cooled.
After an all-out sprint in 2025, the chatbot race is settling into something messier, tighter, and far more competitive.
If I were them, I’d blame the retrograde too.
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