I've been using Codex for software development personally (I have a ChatGPT account), and I use Claude at work (since it is provided by my employer).
I find both Codex and Claude Opus perform at a similar level, and in some ways I actually prefer Codex (I keep hitting quota limits in Opus and have to revert back to Sonnet).
If your question is related to morality (the thing about US politics, DoD contract and so on)... I am not from the US, and I don't care about its internal politics. I also think both OpenAI and Anthropic are evil, and the world would be better if neither existed.
No my question was why would I use codex over gpt 5.4
They perform at a somewhat equal level on writing single files. But Codex is absolute garbage at theory of self/others. That quickly becomes frustrating.
I can tell claude to spawn a new coding agent, and it will understand what that is, what it should be told, and what it can approximately do.
Codex on the other hand will spawn an agent and then tell it to continue with the work. It knows a coding agent can do work, but doesn't know how you'd use it - or that it won't magically know a plan.
You could add more scaffolding to fix this, but Claude proves you shouldn't have to.
I suspect this is a deeper model "intelligence" difference between the two, but I hope 5.4 will surprise me.
> I've been using Codex for software development personally (I have a ChatGPT account), and I use Claude at work (since it is provided by my employer).
Exact same situation here. I've been using both extensively for the last month or so, but still don't really feel either of them is much better or worse. But I have not done large complex features with it yet, mostly just iterative work or small features.
I also feel I am probably being very (overly?) specific in my prompts compared to how other people around me use these agents, so maybe that 'masks' things