In general they do answer differently depending on your tone.
Discussion
I get the point if your entire prompt is "thank you"
If saying "please do X" instead of "do X" is costing them that much they have pretty poorly optimized code.
Your tone definitely affects the tone of responses. If he doesn't think so it is because he is always rude to his AI. Even logically it doesn't check out. They are trained on real human data and polite people are more helpful than rude people. Being polite draws the LLM into a polite context.
But what does o4 mini say?
"So while an LLM doesn’t “reward” kindness per se, framing your question politely and clearly tends to produce the best outcomes."