MODEL COMPARISON
An objective head-to-head of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 across coding, writing, reasoning, context length, and price. Or use both at once in a council.
GPT-5.6 wins on versatility, tool-calling, and ecosystem — it has the broadest plugin/connector library, adaptive reasoning, and a 1M-token context window. Claude Opus 4.8 wins on coding and writing quality — it leads SWE-bench, offers a 1M-token context window in beta, and follows complex multi-step instructions better. On price, Sonnet 4.6 delivers Opus-class code at $3/$15 per million tokens, which undercuts GPT-5.5's $5/$30. Neither model is universally better. The right answer for important work is to run both in an LLM council and let a moderator surface where they agree (consensus you can trust) and disagree (the actual hard parts of your question). For casual chat, pick whichever subscription you already have.
Council AI runs GPT-5.6 and Claude Opus 4.8 in parallel on the same prompt, then a moderator model synthesizes a single answer noting where they agree and disagree. Start free.
Neither universally. GPT-5.6 wins versatility, tool-calling, and ecosystem. Claude Opus 4.8 wins coding (SWE-bench leader), writing nuance, and long-context (1M). Pick by task or run both in a council.
They cost the same on input: Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol are both $5 per million input tokens, and Anthropic is cheaper on output ($25 vs $30). Claude Sonnet 5 delivers near-Opus quality at $3/$15.
Yes. Council AI runs both in parallel and synthesizes a moderator answer. You get the strengths of both labs in one workflow.
Claude has 1M tokens in beta vs GPT-5.5's 400K. For whole-codebase reasoning, Claude is the pick.