Confused by recent benchmarks?

So, I am a heavy user of AI at work and in private, right now I have both the $100 OAI subscription and the $200 Anthropic subscription.

I mostly do spec/TDD driven development with subagents, e.g. Superpowers' Brainstorm - Plan - Execute - Validate loop.

At work it's mostly "integrate some new feature into legacy codebase" or "Fix bug".

For new ideas / private projects I also use Anthropic's 'Product Management' plugin. both in Codex and Claude).

And I can just not understand how 95% of public benchmarks (literally the first few results on google) all put GPT 5.5, sometimes even GPT 5.4 or GPT-Codex 5.3 above Opus in just about anything.

Now I am not saying GPT 5.4 / 5.5 are bad models or anything, you get what you pay for, but once tasks become a little more complicated (i.e. every single real project) Opus is just clearly better, every time. Each further message improves the previous results while for 5.5 it's always 2-3 passes more because I need to remind it of something it forgot.

Some pages do have Anthropic models at the top, just how I would expect it from my own experience so I am wondering wtf the others are testing?

My guesses:

- they are testing raw api in a custom runner, i.e. Claude is stronger in its native environment (Claude Code) than GPT in Codex, but Opus isn't stronger than GPT 5.5 on neutral grounds

- they are testing 1m Context Window Enterprise Editions of GPT 5.4/GPT 5.5 and these are actually stronger.

Maybe someone who actually likes 5.5 better than 4.7 can respond? Looking forward to your opinions.