Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5.6 Sol
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (84 vs 55 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.6 Sol is meaningfully stronger at math (95 vs 80).
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 40% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5.6 Sol | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M | Not announced |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$3.00 | $5.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $30.00 |
| Release date | 2026-02 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5.6 Sol |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 79.6% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 72.5% | - |
| GPQA | 79.7% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | - | 88.8% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Ultra) | - | 91.9% |
| ExploitBench | - | competitive with Mythos Preview |
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-5.6 Sol if...
- →You are an approved preview partner needing the most capable model for agentic software engineering
- →Complex multi-step tasks that benefit from subagent orchestration (Ultra) or maximum reasoning depth (max)
- →Frontier scientific research, professional knowledge work, or security-sensitive workloads