OpenAI had worse models (GPT 5.2 and 5.4) at that time. But now the tables have turned. Would Anthropic face a similar situation since Opus 4.7 falls below expectations?
Claude and Claude Code are still quite useful even when considering the recent degradations, so I don't think corporate users will leave easily especially considering that they're subsidized by their companies. I think the most likely scenario is that Anthropic will remove the Max ($100 / $200) subscriptions (which were the sweet spot for most users) and opt for token-based prices instead, which will make the average cost 2x ~ 3x higher which will keep them afloat in terms of ROI. Performance will plateau though since model research cannot sustain itself any longer, and then it's only a matter of how fast the open-source Chinese models will catch up in efficiency.
What if the competitors are also expensive? If one of OpenAI and Anthropic raises prices, the other one will follow suit (since both have the same profitability problem).
Open source models currently look good on paper, but the flagship models are still quite huge and cannot be run efficiently on consumer hardware, thus having the same inference hosting cost issues (I'm assuming OpenAI and Anthropic has done a shit ton of optimizations already on their servers.) The main breakthrough needed is plainly cheaper and more efficient hardware (such as TPUs or Huawei Ascends), and how to scale infrastructure quickly without losing money.