OpenAI Is Catching Up To Anthropic in AI Coding

Art by Mike Sullivan

OpenAI’s effort to catch up to Anthropic in code-generating artificial intelligence seems to be working.

New data show OpenAI’s Codex coding assistant has pulled ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Code assistant in certain coding capabilities. Codex usage among developers is also catching up to Claude Code’s.

Developers approved 74.3% of code written by Codex, slightly higher than Claude Code’s 73.7% success rate in terms of approving code pull requests, according to data from more than 300,000 pull requests collected by startup Modu. (Pull requests are proposed changes to code.)

Modu, a startup that was founded in June, has valuable data because it helps software developers access multiple coding assistants including Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Devin and more. Modu isn’t the only one making these claims, though. Over the last month, developers on X and Reddit—even in Claude Code’s subreddit—have pointed out improvements in Codex’s performance.