Having a lead in a new market even for a short time creates initial conditions that are in your favor. That’s why startups get all fired up over being first to market.

Sure, but OpenAI has caught up with such velocity (and frankly has the better models) such that it's kind of irrational to refuse it based on "vibes"

I know it is irrational vibes, but how the whole Department of Defense situation was handled will always make me partial to Anthropic. Unless there so huge shift, of course.

No, it wasn't and no one who used Codex and Claude since release could seriously make this claim. It was a magnitude behind Claude and only catched up recently