Claude Sonnet 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol: pricing, Quality, Value, and benchmarks

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Pricing, app access, and Conversation Value

• Humanity's Last Exam

  Normalized quality input

  43.2%

  Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 system card | Vendor-reported Anthropic Sonnet 5 HLE no-tools score. Do not replace with tools-enabled HLE variants.

• SWE-Bench Pro

  Software engineering task resolution

  63.2%

  Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 system card | Vendor-reported Anthropic Sonnet 5 SWE-Bench Pro score. Do not substitute SWE-Bench Verified.

• Terminal-Bench 2.1

  Agentic terminal task completion

  80.4%

  Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 system card | Vendor-reported Anthropic Sonnet 5 Terminal-Bench 2.1 score using mini-SWE-agent. Display-only companion evidence.

• AA-Omniscience

  AA-Omniscience Index

  15.3

  Artificial Analysis AA-Omniscience evaluation | Independent Artificial Analysis result for Claude Sonnet 5 (max). Display-only; this row does not affect Quality or Value scores.

• Humanity's Last Exam

  Normalized quality input

  47.2%

  Artificial Analysis GPT-5.6 Sol max analysis page | Independent Artificial Analysis HLE result for the max-reasoning model variant. Treat as tier-3 provisional evidence and do not describe it as OpenAI-published no-tools HLE.

• AA-Omniscience

  AA-Omniscience Index

  21.7

  Artificial Analysis AA-Omniscience evaluation | Independent Artificial Analysis result for GPT-5.6 Sol (max). Display-only; this row does not affect Quality or Value scores.

• SWE-Bench Pro

  Normalized quality input

  64.6%

  OpenAI GPT-5.6 release | OpenAI official GPT-5.6 launch table. Results are vendor-reported and must retain the named model tier, reasoning setting, benchmark version, and harness caveats.

• GPQA Diamond

  Normalized quality input

  94.6%

  OpenAI GPT-5.6 release | OpenAI official GPT-5.6 launch table. Results are vendor-reported and must retain the named model tier, reasoning setting, benchmark version, and harness caveats.

Ship Claude Sonnet 5 as the default Sonnet upgrade for production coding, agentic, and long-context workloads; budget for the September price step-up and reserve Opus for tasks that justify the higher tier.

Claude Sonnet 5 is the right default Sonnet model for most production teams that want stronger coding, agentic, and multi-step performance without moving every workload to Opus. It replaces Sonnet 4.6 in the current Claude lineup, carries stronger accepted-source HLE and SWE-Bench Pro evidence, and adds a 1M token context window that materially improves RAG, repository-scale coding, and document-heavy workflows. The migration still deserves an engineering review: the public row uses Anthropic vendor-reported benchmark evidence, the introductory API price ends after August 31, 2026, and plan-level availability or limits can vary by Claude surface. Treat it as the new default, test your real prompts and retrieval payloads, and route to Opus only when the task genuinely needs the higher-cost tier.

OpenAI’s flagship for complex professional work and coding, at premium API pricing.

GPT-5.6 Sol is OpenAI’s flagship tier for complex coding and professional work. Its strong independent HLE and official SWE-Bench Pro evidence come with the family’s highest API price, so it is best reserved for work that justifies maximum capability.