Earlier this week, Sam Altman had been feuding with Elon Musk on X, but he’s now acquired a different target.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been relentlessly attacking Anthropic the last few days, criticizing it for its moves to change its Fable 5 access for paid plans, and even questioning its artistic choices. This follows the successful release of GPT 5.6 last week. GPT 5.6’s Sol variant performed well on benchmarks, and even beat Fable and Mythos on some, resting just a point behind Fable on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Right after, Anthropic reset its rate limits for its paid users, getting OpenAI’s Tibo Sottieux to comment “I smell fear”.
Altman has only piled on to the sentiment. He highlighted the fact that Fable 5 seemed much more expensive than GPT 5.6 Sol.
He also appeared to attack Anthropic’s flip-flops on Fable 5’s access on paid plans. “clarity is nice,” he posted on X after Tibo Sottiaux had assured users that GPT 5.6 Sol would stay in the ChatGPT paid subscription.
He then went even more direct. “Come for the best model, stay because we don’t treat you with contempt,” he posted on X, hinting that Anthropic wasn’t treating their users well.
And somewhat bizarrely, he also attacked Anthropic’s 4-day-old video titled “There’s hope in hard questions”, which uses real voice snippets from its users. “I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something,” Altman mocked. “”Hard questions are great but only if we deem you worthy enough to not silently downgrade you, or even get access at all”” he added
Now Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei isn’t on X, and no Anthropic employees on the platform have reacted, which means that the jibes haven’t been responded to. But Altman’s attack seems partly motivated by relief at finally having sort of caught up to Anthropic, even if GPT 5.6 Sol is a point behind Fable on the Intelligence Index. It’s well-known that there’s no love lost between OpenAI and Anthropic since the second group broke away to form their own company, and having seen Anthropic take the lead on both revenue and public mindspace would’ve been a bitter pill to swallow for Altman. And apart from trolling a bitter rival, he now also seems to want to drive the point home that OpenAI now has a competitive model that’s cheaper than Fable with — at least for the moment — more clarity on its availability.