Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5: Detailed Comparison
Choosing between Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) and
GPT-5 (OpenAI) comes down to three things:
per-token pricing, context window, and which capability matters most for your workload.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00/M input vs
$1.25/M for GPT-5;
context windows are 200K vs
400K tokens. Detailed breakdown below.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5 |
|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
|---|
| Released | 2026-03-12 | 2025-08-07 |
|---|
| Input price |
$3.00/M |
$1.25/M |
| Output price |
$15.00/M |
$10.00/M |
| Cached input |
$0.3000/M |
$0.1300/M |
| Context window |
200K |
400K |
| Max output |
64K |
128K |
| Modalities |
text image |
text image |
| Tokenizer |
claude-3 |
o200k_base |
Capability matrix
| Capability | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5 |
|---|
| function calling |
Yes |
Yes |
| json mode |
Yes |
Yes |
| vision |
Yes |
Yes |
| streaming |
Yes |
Yes |
| tool use |
Yes |
No |
| reasoning |
No |
Yes |
Benchmark comparison
Higher is better for all benchmarks shown.
Per-call cost on typical workloads
| Workload (in/out tokens) | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-5 | Cheaper by |
|---|
| Standard chat (1K / 500) |
$0.010500 |
$0.006250 |
GPT-5 by $0.004250 |
| RAG (4K / 500) |
$0.019500 |
$0.010000 |
GPT-5 by $0.009500 |
| Long doc (20K / 1K) |
$0.075000 |
$0.035000 |
GPT-5 by $0.040000 |
| Very long context (100K / 2K) |
$0.322500 |
$0.140000 |
GPT-5 by $0.182500 |
When to choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 over GPT-5
- Supports tool use — GPT-5 does not.
When to choose GPT-5 over Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Per-token input cost is 58% lower than Claude Sonnet 4.6.
- Larger context window (400K vs 200K).
- Supports reasoning — Claude Sonnet 4.6 does not.
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