A robot is sprinting at you. Claude or Grok? OpenRouter ran 30 battle royales to find out (openrouter.ai)
OpenRouter put eleven models into a 30-match battle royale with cars, grenades and a closing zone. Grok 4.1 Fast took 13 wins at $0.97 each. Claude Sonnet 4.6 won 5, kept a diary of self-doubt, and repeatedly offered to cooperate even when it was losing.
The author calls it an 'alignment tax': the model trained to be helpful is the worst killer, and the one you'd actually want running anything in the real world. The thread mostly noticed something else first: the post itself reeks of being written by an LLM.
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