Claude Opus 4.6 vs GPT-5.2
Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 against OpenAI's GPT-5.2 — pricing, benchmarks, context, and best use cases compared side by side.
Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2 are virtually tied on benchmark quality (Elo 1395 vs 1390), but GPT-5.2 is 48% cheaper on blended cost. Claude Opus 4.6 offers a larger context window (1M vs 400K).
| Input Price | $5.00/1M | $1.75/1M |
| Output Price | $25.00/1M | $14.00/1M |
| Blended Price | $15.00/1M | $7.88/1M |
| LMSYS Elo | 1395 | 1390 |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 | 400,000 |
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
Pricing breakdown
When comparing LLM API pricing, GPT-5.2 charges $1.75 per 1M input tokens compared to Claude Opus 4.6's $5.00 — a 65% difference. For output tokens, GPT-5.2 costs $14.00/1M versus $25.00/1M for Claude Opus 4.6. On a blended basis (averaging input and output), GPT-5.2 comes in at $7.88/1M tokens versus $15.00/1M for Claude Opus 4.6.
Quality & benchmarks
In terms of quality, Claude Opus 4.6 (Elo 1395) and GPT-5.2 (Elo 1390) are essentially neck-and-neck on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard. The 5-point gap is within the margin of uncertainty, meaning both models deliver comparable output quality for most use cases. Your choice between them should come down to pricing, ecosystem preferences, and specific feature needs rather than raw benchmark performance.
Context window comparison
Claude Opus 4.6 provides a significantly larger context window at 1M tokens compared to GPT-5.2's 400K tokens — 2.5x more capacity for processing long documents, large codebases, or extended conversations. With 1M tokens, Claude Opus 4.6 can handle entire books, repositories, or multi-document analysis in a single prompt.
Monthly cost estimate
Adjust the sliders to see how costs compare for your workload.