OpenAI released GPT-5.5 today, exactly one week after Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.7. The timing is not subtle. Opus 4.7 took the SWE-Bench Verified crown at 87.6% and put Anthropic at the top of most third-party coding leaderboards; GPT-5.5 is the direct response. Worth flagging upfront: SWE-Bench Verified scores at this tier should be read with heavy skepticism. Every frontier lab has plausibly trained on or adjacent to this data, and Anthropic itself has acknowledged memorization signals on related SWE-Bench splits. Treat any Verified or Pro number in this post as a directional signal, not a trustworthy measurement — we include them because they are what the labs report, not because we think they carry much weight. The release is interesting for software engineers not because it "wins" — the verdict is more mixed than OpenAI's launch post suggests — but because of the specific benchmarks it wins on, the specific ones it doesn't, and the pricing decision that frames everything else.…