Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-4o
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at long context (90 vs 55 on our capability index).
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M context window vs 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-4o | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 128,000 tokens (16,384 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | ✓$2.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2026-02 | 2024-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 79.6% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 72.5% | - |
| GPQA | 79.7% | - |
| MMLU | - | 88.7% |
| HumanEval | - | 90.2% |
| MATH | - | 76.6% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if...
- →You have an existing integration pinned to Sonnet 4.6 and want stability
- →You need a proven mid-tier model with 1M context at $3/$15
- →You want predictable behavior without the new-tokenizer/thinking changes in Sonnet 5
- →You are cost-sensitive and don't need Sonnet 5's incremental gains
Choose GPT-4o if...
- →Everyday assistant, drafting, summarization, and classification tasks
- →Latency- and cost-sensitive applications at scale
- →Multimodal tasks needing image understanding with fast responses