MODEL WARS

STREET SMART
VS
BOOK SMART

Claude and GPT are the two poles of the same magnet. GPT maxes benchmarks. Claude ships. Both are excellent — but they're excellent at different things, for different builders, in different contexts.

● Claude — Anthropic● GPT — OpenAI
Claude Opus 4.6
Input / 1M
$15
Output / 1M
$75
Context
200K
MMLU
93%
SWE-bench
72.5%
GMB Score
90.7
GPT-5.4 Pro
Input / 1M
$15
Output / 1M
$60
Context
128K
MMLU
95%
SWE-bench
54.2%
GMB Score
83

DIMENSION BREAKDOWN

● Claude● GPT
CodingCLAUDE WINS
9391

Claude leads SWE-bench by 23 points at flagship tier

ReasoningGPT WINS
9596

GPT-5.4 Pro edges ahead on GPQA and competition math

WritingCLAUDE WINS
9685

Claude is the clear choice — naturalness, tone, no AI tells

CreativeCLAUDE WINS
8981

Claude takes more risks; GPT outputs feel focus-grouped

VisionGPT WINS
8290

GPT-5.4 OSWorld computer use: 75.3% vs human 72.4% baseline

SpeedGPT WINS
7888

GPT consistently faster on output tokens/sec

Long ContextCLAUDE WINS
9580

Claude at 200K context; GPT capped at 128K

WHEN TO USE WHICH

Production code / agentic dev
Claude Sonnet is the default in Cursor, Cody, and most agent frameworks
Claude
Writing, copy, brand voice
Naturalness, tone control, no AI tells. No contest.
Claude
Vision / screenshot / charts
GPT-5.4 natively interprets UI and charts better
GPT
Reasoning / hard math
GPT-5.4 Pro with thinking mode for competition-level problems
GPT
High-volume API at low cost
GPT-5.4 at $2.50/$10 vs Claude Sonnet at $3/$15
GPT
Long document processing
200K context vs 128K — Claude handles the full corpus
Claude
Tool use / function calling
Both strong; Claude slightly better at staying on task in long chains
Tie
Enterprise content moderation
OpenAI has more enterprise compliance tooling and audit logging
GPT