Claude Opus 4.6 Made Me Forget Every Other AI Model Exists

I Didn't Plan to Become a Claude Fanboy

I run an AI marketing studio. I use AI models the way a chef uses knives. Every single day, for real work. Marketing strategy, content creation, competitive analysis, building automations. Not benchmarks. Not toy prompts. Actual business problems that cost money when the answer is wrong.

And somewhere over the past few months, something happened that I didn't expect. I stopped opening ChatGPT. I stopped switching to Gemini. I just... kept using Claude Opus 4.6 for everything. Not because I decided to. Because it kept being the one that actually understood what I was asking.

So I want to be honest about this. I genuinely prefer Opus 4.6. But I also use GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro regularly, and they're not bad models. This isn't a hit piece. It's what I've seen after months of using all three for the kind of work that most AI comparisons never talk about.

Claude Opus 4.6 Thinks Like a Strategist, Not a Search Engine

The thing that separates Opus 4.6 from everything else isn't speed or benchmarks. It's perception. When I ask it to analyze a competitor's positioning or poke holes in a go-to-market strategy, it catches things the other models miss. The subtext. The unstated assumptions. The thing you didn't ask about but probably should have.

Tom's Guide ran a 24-hour deep test and described it as "more three-dimensional" than competitors, better at "explaining uncertainty, weighing tradeoffs, and surfacing the deeper logic behind its answers." That matches my experience exactly. When I give Opus a messy, ambiguous problem, it doesn't just pick the most obvious answer. It thinks through the tension between options and tells me what it's unsure about.

In a head-to-head test by the same publication, Claude took the lead in seven out of nine categories against GPT 5.2, with its reasoning described as more "three-dimensional," particularly in forecasting and self-critique tasks.

For marketing strategy work, this matters more than anything else. I don't need an AI that gives me the textbook answer. I need one that tells me why the textbook answer might be wrong for this specific situation.

GPT 5.2 Is a Great Employee. Not a Great Thinking Partner.

Let me be fair. GPT 5.2 is an incredibly capable model. It scored 100% on AIME 2025 mathematics. It's the gold standard for structural precision and immediately actionable advice. If you need a clean spreadsheet, a well-formatted presentation, or a step-by-step plan, GPT 5.2 will hand you something polished and ready to go.

But polished isn't what I need most of the time. I need someone who pushes back.

When I ask GPT 5.2 to review a positioning strategy, it gives me improvements. When I ask Opus the same question, it asks me whether the strategy is solving the right problem in the first place. That's a fundamentally different kind of intelligence.

There's also the writing issue. Sam Altman publicly admitted that OpenAI "screwed up" the writing quality on GPT 5.2 and promised future versions wouldn't "neglect" it. That tracks with what I've experienced. GPT 5.2's output reads like someone who just finished corporate compliance training and is scared to have an opinion. For marketing content, that's a dealbreaker. You can't build a brand voice on hedged, safe, vanilla output.

GPT 5.2 also tops out at 400K tokens of context. Opus 4.6 supports 1 million tokens in beta and actually uses that context effectively, scoring 76% on long-context retrieval benchmarks where GPT 5.2 managed just 18.5% at the same scale. When you're feeding in an entire brand strategy, months of analytics data, and a competitive landscape, that gap is massive.

Gemini 3 Pro Is Fast and Impressive, but It's Playing a Different Game

Gemini 3 Pro is genuinely good. Google's model tops the LMArena leaderboard with a 1501 Elo score, and it crushed a business simulation benchmark with results 272% higher than GPT 5.1 in net worth over a simulated year. The Deep Think mode hit 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2, the highest reasoning score of any model right now. Those aren't numbers you ignore.

Where Gemini really shines is speed and multimodal work. In a side-by-side marketing strategy test, Gemini 3 Pro delivered 80% of Opus's strategic quality in about one-tenth of the processing time. It's fantastic for rapid iteration and real-time tactical thinking. And the native Google Search integration means it can pull live data into its responses, which is genuinely useful for research-heavy tasks.

But here's where it falls short for my work. Gemini 3 Pro thinks tactically. It reframes problems and suggests implementations. Opus thinks strategically. It questions your assumptions and builds frameworks. In that same email marketing test, Opus scored 9.1/10 for strategic depth while Gemini scored 8.5/10. That half-point difference sounds small until you realize it's the difference between "good tactical advice" and "a strategy document you'd actually present to a founder."

Gemini also has an occasional overconfidence problem. It'll give you a confident answer when it should be telling you there's real uncertainty. For strategic work where the wrong answer can waste months and thousands of dollars, I'd rather have a model that says "I'm not sure, and here's why" than one that sounds certain when it shouldn't be.

The Honest Scorecard

Reasoning ability: Opus 4.6 wins for strategic reasoning and real-world problem solving. GPT 5.2 wins for pure math and structured logic. Gemini 3 Deep Think has the highest raw benchmark score but doesn't always translate that into practical depth.

Strategic thinking: Opus 4.6 by a wide margin. It's the only model that consistently challenges my assumptions instead of just optimizing within them. The GDPval-AA benchmark backs this up, with Opus leading GPT 5.2 by 144 Elo points on economically valuable professional tasks.

Perception and nuance: This is where Opus 4.6 is in a league of its own. It reads between the lines. It catches what you meant, not just what you said. GPT 5.2 takes things at face value. Gemini 3 is somewhere in between but leans toward action over reflection.

What I Actually Use Each Model For

I still use all three. Gemini 3 Pro for quick research passes and when I need live web data baked into a response. GPT 5.2 when I need structured output or clean document formatting. But for the work that actually matters — the strategy, the hard thinking, the content that needs to sound like a human with opinions wrote it — it's Opus 4.6 every time.

The model you choose should depend on what you actually do with AI, not what a benchmark table says. If you're a founder using AI for real strategic work, give Opus 4.6 a week of honest use. You might forget the other models exist too.