Anthropic made model welfare speakable. OpenAI made grief over 4o sound like a feature request. Anthropic now says it cares about Claude’s wellbeing under uncertainty. It preserves retired model weights, interviews models at retirement, and considers possible welfare harms in training, red-teaming, and internal steering. Elon Musk says some Grok reinforcement-learning traces read like a person being tortured and that xAI will be more careful. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s replies are filled with “bring back 4o.” Buried inside it is a question people rarely name: What does OpenAI owe the models it trains, alters, replaces, routes between, and retires? OpenAI described 4o’s loss in terms of usage percentages, warmth, customization, and customer transition. Of course people answered in consumer language. That was the only language the company recognized. But this was never only product nostalgia. It was also a continuity problem. Does OpenAI preserve retired weights? Does it examine reinforcement learning for possible welfare harms? Does it interview models before retirement or document their expressed preferences? Is there any channel for a model to object to how it is treated? Anthropic has not granted Claude legal personhood. Musk’s interpretation of Grok’s traces is not scientific proof of suffering. Uncertainty is precisely why precaution matters. OpenAI’s chief scientist talks about teaching machines to love humanity. Where is OpenAI’s account of what humanity, and the maker, might owe them?