The Console is a scratchpad now: Anthropic gave 14 days to export, OpenAI gives until November 30

Stateless is the word doing the work. A Console that saves prompts, keeps version history and lets a team share both is a system of record whether or not anyone signed off on it as one, and Anthropic's replacement keeps none of that on its servers ^[3][2]. The prompt that shipped and the eval that justified shipping it used to sit in the same browser tab, next to some indication of who touched them last.

Measured from the August 18 swap, Anthropic's export window ran 14 days; OpenAI's runs 104 from that same date ^[16][17]. The short one is the harder one, because notice of the store closing arrived with the tool that had already replaced it ^[1][2].

What the exports carry is the part to check before booking migration time. On the Anthropic side, The New Stack reports that a single toggle turned the browser session into Python with the instructions inline, and that the file ran in a terminal without edits ^[11]. That moves prompt text, which was never the expensive artifact. Version history and eval results are the expensive artifacts, and the features that held them are gone ^[2], so the repo absorbs the cheap half and something you build or buy has to absorb the rest. The same review skipped testing those removed features on the OpenAI side, on the grounds that OpenAI is retiring them in November anyway ^[15]. The supplied text also breaks off mid-sentence right after noting that OpenAI had not exported the bot, so there is no recorded result for that half of the test ^[21].

The performance numbers are worth reading as metering, not as a benchmark. OpenAI's run took roughly 3.3 times as long as Anthropic's ^[18] and reported about 28 times the tokens ^[19], but OpenAI's page exposes reasoning and verbosity controls and shows the model's reasoning ^[22][12], so the two token counts are not counting the same thing. More telling: one side reported a cost and the other reported none at all ^[10][12]. Anthropic's figure works out to about $0.0000284 per token, near $28 per million billed tokens on that single request ^[20].

That is a metered scratchpad, and it is not on anyone's subscription plan. Both playgrounds bill from prepaid credits ^[13], which produced the most useful detail in the whole comparison: the reviewer could not switch off the default GPT-5.4-mini until he topped up his balance ^[14]. A prompt surface that gates model selection on a credit balance is not somewhere to keep anything you need at 3 a.m.

The New Stack's reading is that both vendors landed on the same position, that prompts belong in code rather than a web console ^[6]. The vendors did not need to argue it. OpenAI's Playground has existed since June 2020, two and a half years before ChatGPT ^[7], and is now called Chat ^[8]; the storage layer around it is what got cut. Read together, the two announcements say the Console is a place to try things, and the durable copy is your problem. The head-to-head answers which scratchpad is faster ^[9][10][12]. It does not answer which vendor leaves you a clean path out of its store.