Comment by bigwheels

If you access a model through an openrouter provider it might be quantized (akin to being "cut with trash"), but when you go directly to Anthropic or OpenAI you are getting access to the same APIs as everyone else. Even top-brass folks within Microsoft use Anthropic and OpenAI proper (not worth the red-tape trouble to go directly through Azure). Also, the creator and maintainer of Claude, Boris Cherny, was a bit of an oddball but one of the comparatively nicer people at Anthropic, and he indicated he primarily uses the same Anthropic APIs as everyone else (which makes sense from a product development perspective).

The underlying models are all actually really undifferentiated under the covers except for the post-training and base prompts. If you eliminate the base prompts the models behave near identically.

A conspiracy would be a helluva lot more interesting and fun, but I've spoken to these folks firsthand and it seems they already have enough challenges keeping the beast running.