Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified (79.6% vs 74.9%).
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at speed (83 vs 68 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5 is meaningfully stronger at math (92 vs 80).
- •GPT-5 is 58% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M context window vs 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 400,000 tokens (128,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | ✓$1.25 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $10.00 |
| Release date | 2026-02 | 2025-08 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ✓79.6% | 74.9% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 72.5% | - |
| GPQA | 79.7% | - |
| AIME 2025 | - | 94.6% |
| GPQA (GPT-5 pro) | - | 88.4% |
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 if...
- →You want strong reasoning at the lowest frontier-model price
- →Existing GPT-5-based systems that are already tuned and validated
- →General coding, math, and reasoning workloads on a budget