The game changed in May 2025 when Anthropic released Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet, just three months after Google had stunned the industry with Gemini 2.5's record-breaking benchmarks. Within a week, Anthropic's new models topped those same benchmarks. Two months later, OpenAI countered with GPT-5. By September, Claude Sonnet 4.5 arrived. The pace had...