Head-to-head
GPT-5.5 vs Claude Opus 5: which AI model wins in 2026?
GPT-5.5 ($30/1M out) and Claude Opus 5 ($25/1M out) are two of the most-used AI models in 2026. Across 7 community votes, Claude Opus 5 leads with 63% approval.
Quick verdict
On Reasoning, GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 5 are tied at 5/5. On budget, Claude Opus 5 wins: it starts at $25/1M out versus $30/1M out for GPT-5.5.
Line-by-line comparison
Strengths and weaknesses
GPT-5.5
- 1M-token context window (1,050,000) with 128K max output and reasoning effort tunable from none to xhigh
- State-of-the-art ARC-AGI-2 at 85.0% (vs 73.3% for GPT-5.4) and Terminal-Bench 2.0 at 82.7%
- Strong agentic coding autonomy: devs report it one-shots tasks that took GPT-5.4 multiple turns and fixes its own mistakes; +50 points on Code Arena vs GPT-5.4
- Aggressive discounts: 90% off cached input ($0.50/1M) and 50% off via Batch or Flex ($2.50/$15)
- Fast for a frontier reasoner: devs say it is the first GPT model comfortable to run at medium or low thinking effort
- List price doubled vs GPT-5.4 ($5/$30 vs $2.50/$15) for the same 1M-token context window
- Overly literal instruction-following: devs report it fails to infer intent in obvious places where Claude succeeds
- Trails Claude Opus 4.8 on SWE-bench Pro (58.6% vs 69.2%); HN developers still favor Claude roughly 2:1 for coding
- Sometimes too conservative with code changes or skips deep reasoning entirely, answering immediately on complex prompts
- Long-context surcharge: prompts over 272K input tokens are billed 2x input and 1.5x output for the whole session
Claude Opus 5
- Ranked #1 in composite intelligence across 190 models on Artificial Analysis at launch, and 43.3% on Frontier-Bench v0.1 vs 34.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol and 33.7% for Claude Fable 5
- 3.9x better than GPT-5.6 Sol on ARC-AGI-3 novel reasoning (30.2% vs 7.8%), and Elo 1861 on GDPval-AA v2 economic knowledge work, ahead of Fable 5 (1747)
- 79.2% on SWE-bench Pro, within a point of Fable 5 (80.0%) and 10 points above Opus 4.8 (69.2%), at half Fable's price; Cursor's co-founder calls it 'near Fable 5 intelligence at Opus speed and cost'
- Same $5/$25 pricing as Opus 4.8 with a bigger window: 1M context is now the default and only tier, with 128K max output and prompt caching from 512 tokens
- Dual-use safety classifiers trigger 85% less often than on Fable 5, and the new default fallback mode avoids the silent mid-session refusals that plagued Fable's launch
- Self-verifies its work without being told, handles mid-conversation tool changes (beta) without busting the prompt cache, and ships day one on Claude.ai, the API, Bedrock, Vertex and Microsoft Foundry
- Notably slow and very verbose: 52.6 output tokens/s and 68 seconds to first token on Artificial Analysis, and it consumed ~100M output tokens during their eval vs a 63M median
- The verbosity is a real-world cost problem: CodeRabbit measured it reading ~50% more and writing ~65% more than reference frontier models per code-review call
- No actual price cut despite the 'cost-efficient' narrative: identical to Opus 4.8 ($5/$25), nearly GPT-5.6 money ($5/$30), and more than 2x comparable Gemini or Grok tiers
- Reviewers describe a 'brilliant but annoying' personality: over-verification, hedging, and occasional refusals of mundane tasks like resolving a merge conflict (Lenny's Newsletter field review)
- Breaking API change for Opus 4.8 migrants: thinking is on by default and cannot be disabled at xhigh or max effort (returns a 400); Fast mode ($10/$50, ~2.5x faster) is API-only, not on Bedrock or Vertex
Cast your verdict
One recommendation per tool per gladiator. It reshapes the crowd score everyone sees.
The arena’s verdict on GPT-5.5
Pick GPT-5.5 over GPT-5.4 if you need stronger agentic autonomy, terminal-heavy workflows, or SOTA abstract reasoning, but know the list price doubled from GPT-5.4's $2.50/$15 to $5/$30 while the 1M-token context stayed the same. Teams doing high-stakes multi-file refactoring may still prefer Claude Opus, which leads SWE-bench Pro (69.2% vs 58.6%) and infers intent better from loose prompts. Budget-sensitive users should mind the 272K-token surcharge and reports of faster limit burn, and lean on caching, Batch, or Flex to halve costs.
The arena’s verdict on Claude Opus 5
Claude Opus 5 is the sane default of the Series 5 range: most of Fable 5's intelligence (and more than Fable on Frontier-Bench and GDPval) at exactly half the token price, with classifiers that trigger 85% less often. If you migrated workloads to Fable 5 for capability but resent the bill or the false-positive refusals, move them here; if you are still on Opus 4.8, the upgrade is 10 SWE-bench Pro points for free. The two honest reasons to look elsewhere: latency and verbosity. At 52.6 tokens/s with 68s to first token it is a poor fit for interactive UX, and its token appetite quietly inflates real costs beyond the sticker price, so budget-sensitive high-volume pipelines still belong on Sonnet 5, Gemini or DeepSeek. Keep Fable 5 only for the longest autonomous runs where its slight SWE-bench Pro edge compounds.
What the crowd says
On GPT-5.5
“It is painfully literal. Where Claude infers intent in obvious places, 5.5 wants everything spelled out. And the price doubled vs 5.4 for the same 1M context.”
“85 on ARC-AGI-2 and you can feel it. Stuff that used to stall my agent just resolves now. 1M context with 128K output covers every workflow I have.”
“5.5 one-shots tasks that took 5.4 three turns, and it fixes its own mistakes mid-run instead of doubling down. The reasoning effort dial from none to xhigh is genuinely useful.”
On Claude Opus 5
“The sticker price is unchanged but my invoice is not: it writes essays where Opus 4.8 wrote answers. 68 seconds to first token killed it for our support chat, we went back to Sonnet 5.”
“Fed it a 40-tab financial model with cross-sheet formulas and asked for a scenario deck. It got the edge cases the analysts missed. For document-heavy enterprise work this is the best model I have used.”
“We moved off Fable 5 because the bio classifier kept flagging our genomics tooling. Opus 5 does the same work at half the price and I have not seen a single silent reroute since.”
“Migrated our agents from Opus 4.8 the day it dropped. Same bill, and tasks that used to stall at the planning stage now just finish. The 10-point SWE-bench jump is not marketing, our merge queue feels it.”
Keep comparing
Frequently asked questions
Is GPT-5.5 better than Claude Opus 5?
The crowd currently sides with Claude Opus 5: 63% recommend it, versus 57% for GPT-5.5 (7 votes). The right pick depends on your use case. The line-by-line comparison on this page breaks down pricing, key specs and arena ratings.
Which is cheaper, GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus 5?
Claude Opus 5 is cheaper: it starts at $25/1M out, while GPT-5.5 starts at $30/1M out.
How much do GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 5 cost per 1M tokens?
GPT-5.5: $5/1M in per 1M input tokens, $30/1M out per 1M output tokens. Claude Opus 5: $5/1M in per 1M input tokens, $25/1M out per 1M output tokens.