Claude Opus 4.8 vs GPT-4o
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-4o is 83% cheaper on input tokens - better for high-volume workloads.
- •Claude Opus 4.8 has a 200K context window - 2x larger than GPT-4o's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
Specs comparison
| Claude Opus 4.8 | GPT-4o | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓200K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $15.00 | ✓$2.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $75.00 | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2024-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | - | 88.7% |
| HumanEval | - | 90.2% |
| GPQA | - | 53.6% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
Claude Opus 4.8
- ✓Best-in-class multi-step reasoning
- ✓Improved instruction following over Opus 4.7
- ✓Reduced refusals on edge-case and nuanced requests
- ✓Superior long-context comprehension at 200K tokens
- ✓Strong scientific and mathematical analysis
GPT-4o
- ✓Native multimodal input (text, image, audio)
- ✓Fast response times at this capability level
- ✓Strong on structured data and JSON output
- ✓Best ecosystem support across SDKs and tools
- ✓Real-time audio capabilities
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if you need...
- →Complex research and analysis tasks
- →High-stakes code generation
- →Long-document analysis
- →Nuanced reasoning requiring careful judgment
Choose GPT-4o if you need...
- →Multimodal apps
- →High-volume production use
- →Chatbots and assistants
- →Structured data extraction