GPT-5.6 vs o1
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •GPT-5.6 is meaningfully stronger at speed (72 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •GPT-5.6 is 67% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
Specs comparison
| GPT-5.6 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | Not announced | ✓200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓5 | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | 30 | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | GPT-5.6 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Sol) | 88.8% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Terra) | 82.5% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Luna) | 84.3% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 88.8 | - |
| ExploitBench | Competitive with Anthropic Mythos Preview | - |
| ExploitGym | Significant improvements | - |
| GeneBench v1 | Not announced | - |
| AIME 2024 | - | 74% |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 77.3% |
| Codeforces | - | ~89th percentile |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose GPT-5.6 if...
- →You want to standardize on one model generation but route requests across cost/quality tiers
- →You are an approved preview partner exploring the newest OpenAI capabilities
- →Workloads spanning agentic coding, knowledge work, and research where tier flexibility helps
Choose o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks