Claude Sonnet 5 vs GPT-5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 5 leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified (~85.2% vs 74.9%).
- •Claude Sonnet 5 is meaningfully stronger at speed (82 vs 68 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5 is 58% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •Claude Sonnet 5 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 5 | 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 | 2026-06 | 2025-08 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 5 | GPT-5 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ✓~85.2% | 74.9% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 80.4% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 63.2% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 81.2% | - |
| 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 5 if...
- →You want frontier-adjacent agentic coding but need better cost-efficiency than Opus
- →You are running high-volume agent loops and want strong reasoning per dollar
- →You are already on Sonnet 4.6 and want a same-price capability upgrade
- →You need a 1M context window with fast latency
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