Leader is debatable, especially given the actual comparisons...

That would make sense if OAI were the leader.

There is no uniform tactic for this type of marketing. They will compare against whomever they need to to suit their marketing goals.

also sometimes if you get it wrong you catch unnecessary flak

Okay, it's common across other industries, but not this one. Here is Google, Facebook, and Anthropic comparing their frontier models to others[1][2][3].

[1] https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/gemini-model-...

[2] https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/

[3] https://www.anthropic.com/claude/sonnet

Right. Those labs aren’t leading the industry.

Confusing take - Gemini 2.5 is probably the best general purpose coding model right now, and before that it was Sonnet 3.5. (Maybe 3.7 if you can get it to be less reward-hacky.) OpenAI hasn't had the best coding model for... coming up on a year, now? (o1-pro probably "outperformed" Sonnet 3.5 but you'd be waiting 10 minutes for a response, so.)

Except they are far from the lead in model performance

Who has a (publicly released) model that is SOTA is constantly changing. It’s more interesting to see who is driving the innovation in the field, and right now that is pretty clearly OpenAI (GPT-3, first multi-modal model, first reasoning model, ect).