AI Programming Competition: OpenAI Codex Surpasses Anthropic Claude?

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In the field of AI programming assistants, an intense ranking competition is underway. The latest data shows that OpenAI's programming assistant Codex has surpassed Anthropic's Claude Code in certain core capabilities.

On October 9, according to data from over 300,000 code pull requests collected by startup Modu, developers' approval rate for code generated by Codex reached 74.3%, slightly higher than Claude Code's 73.7%.

This data has been indirectly confirmed by the market. Over the past month, on social media platforms such as X and Reddit, some developers have noticed significant improvements in Codex's performance.

Analysis suggests that this reversal is mainly due to OpenAI's release of the GPT-5-Codex model last month. According to Modu co-founder Brexton Pham, before the release of this model, the code success rate of OpenAI's older version of Codex was only 69%. The introduction of the new model has been key to OpenAI regaining ground in this competition.

For Anthropic, winning the coding competition seems highly significant. According to The Information, the company's revenue mainly comes from selling its AI models through APIs to customers such as Microsoft, and coding technology is the core driver of its income.

In contrast, OpenAI, which owns the commercial giant ChatGPT, is less reliant on income from coding services. However, its leadership regards coding as a "key gear" in the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and last year doubled down on efforts to enhance the coding abilities of its models.

Performance Leads, But User Habits Remain a Challenge

Although Codex has gained a slight advantage in code generation quality, it still faces significant challenges in attracting developer usage. Data shows that among code requests ultimately merged by developers, Codex was used in 24.9%, while Claude Code accounted for 32.1%.

However, Brexton Pham pointed out that compared to before the release of the new model, Codex’s market share has increased by five percentage points, showing a growth trend.

Nevertheless, from another perspective, the gap remains considerable. According to software registry NPM, Claude Code now has over 5 million weekly downloads, whereas Codex has only 190,000.

This indicates that for OpenAI to turn its performance advantage into market dominance, there is still a long way to go; changing developer habits will be its main obstacle.

Fierce Market Competition, Cost Not a Decisive Factor

Interestingly, cost does not seem to be the primary factor for developers when choosing tools. Brexton Pham stated that although Codex is cheaper than Claude Code, developers are currently willing to pay higher prices for high-performance products, as they generally expect costs to decrease in the long term. For enterprise decision-makers, investing in AI programming assistants to improve the efficiency of existing engineers is far more cost-effective than hiring more human engineers.

Furthermore, the AI coding market is not limited to just these two giants. Modu's data reveals the existence of some "dark horses." For example, Sourcegraph's Amp agent achieved a 76.8% approval rate, making it the most recognized code assistant among developers. Brexton Pham described it as a "boutique luxury" product on the market—more expensive but with better performance.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini CLI, with its consistently low pricing strategy, has become the cheapest coding assistant currently available. It is worth noting that Modu's benchmark tests have yet to include major products such as GitHub Copilot and Google’s Jules agent, which means the full competitive landscape of the market has yet to be fully revealed.

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