GPT-5.6 Sol vs Claude Sonnet 5
Side-by-side comparison. Updated 2026-07-09.
Summary
Compare GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5 across pricing, context window, modalities, strengths, weaknesses, and best-fit workloads.
Use the details below to weigh cost, context, modalities, and workload fit.
At a Glance
| Attribute | GPT-5.6 Sol | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Anthropic |
| Tags | Agentic Coding Intelligent Long Context Reasoning | Intelligent Reasoning Coding Agentic Image Input Long Context |
| Context | 1,050,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Input price | $5.00/1M | $2.00/1M |
| Output price | $30.00/1M | $10.00/1M |
| Input modalities | Text | Text, Image, File |
| Output modalities | Text | Text |
GPT-5.6 Sol Strengths
- Terminal-Bench 2.1 SOTA (91.9% in Ultra mode)
- Ultra multi-agent mode coordinates parallel sub-agents for complex tasks
- 1.05M-token context for long-horizon agentic work
- Max reasoning-effort control for deeper single-pass reasoning
- New predictable prompt-caching with explicit cache controls
Claude Sonnet 5 Strengths
- 76.1% on Novel Compiler evaluation (vendor-reported)
- 1,000,000 token (~977K) context window with 128k output
- $2.00/M input tokens — 85% cheaper than GPT-5.5 Pro
- 96.65% harmless response rate on API (vendor-reported)
- Up to 90% cost savings with prompt caching