Claude Opus 4.8 vs GPT-5
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5 is 33% cheaper on input tokens - better for high-volume workloads.
- •Claude Opus 4.8 has a 200K context window - 2x larger than GPT-5's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
Specs comparison
| Claude Opus 4.8 | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓200K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $15.00 | ✓$10.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $75.00 | $30.00 |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2025-06 |
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-5
- ✓Strong general-purpose reasoning
- ✓Excellent multimodal understanding
- ✓Broad domain knowledge
- ✓Consistent instruction following
- ✓Widely supported by third-party tools
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-5 if you need...
- →General-purpose API integrations
- →Multimodal applications
- →Complex reasoning tasks
- →Enterprise deployments