I don’t see how they’re going to meet their revenue projections when open models are largely turning LLMs into a free commodity. So far in 2026, we’ve gone from local LLMs being a toy to Qwen 3.8 27B giving the latest Sonnet 5 a run for its money. The OpenCode desktop app is also almost at parity with the Claude desktop app as well and I’ve heard Pi is pretty good too.
Now we are seeing techniques like a “phrase book” evolving to allowing a large portion of a huge model to reside on a SSD instead of in RAM / VRAM so that Opus-class models can run on a gaming PC. For example, this video is nuts: m.youtube.com/watch?v=IH8XmxiwliQ
OpenAI and Anthropic know they’re cooked, so that’s why they’re talking all this nonsense trying to keep the shell game going a while longer. 🍿