At this point it's frankly not a fair comparison since DeepSeek 3.2 is now many months old and we're waiting for a newer model which has been rumoured as "any day now" since February. (We'll see).

GLM5, the largest Qwen 3.5 model, and Kimi K2.5 are more fair comparisons, though they are, yes, a bit behind. They're more than capable for routine operations though.

Anyways, I'm back to using Opus & Claude Code after a month on Codex/GPT5.3 and 5.4 and it's frankly a rather obvious downgrade. Anthropic is behind OpenAI at this point on coding models, and there's nothing to say they couldn't fall behind the Chinese models as well.

The moat is very shallow. After the events of the last two weeks there's likely a significant % of international capital very interested in breaching it. I know I would like to see this... Anthropic basically said F U to any non-Americans, and OpenAI is ... yeah.