Compare/GPT-5.5 (medium) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)

GPT-5.5 (medium)vsClaude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)

Side-by-side comparison of pricing, 12 benchmarks, and generation speed.

OpenAI

GPT-5.5 (medium)

Input
$5/M
Output
$30/M
Speed
59 tok/s
TTFT
4.21s
Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)

Input
$6.25/M
Output
$25/M
Speed
43 tok/s
TTFT
1.58s

Winner by Category

Cheaper
Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
Faster (tok/s)
GPT-5.5 (medium)
Lower Latency
Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
Benchmarks (7-0)
GPT-5.5 (medium)

Pricing Comparison

MetricGPT-5.5 (medium)Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
Input ($/M tokens)$5$6.25
Output ($/M tokens)$30$25
Cost for 1M input + 100K output tokens:
GPT-5.5 (medium)$8.00
Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)$8.75

Speed Comparison

Output Speed (tokens/s) — higher is better
GPT-5.5 (medium)
59 tok/s
Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
43 tok/s
Time to First Token (seconds) — lower is better
GPT-5.5 (medium)
4.21s
Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)
1.58s

Benchmark Comparison

Data from Artificial Analysis API — 12 benchmarks

Intelligence Index
56.746.5
Coding Index
56.247.6
Math Index
GPQA Diamond
92.6%84.0%
MMLU-Pro
LiveCodeBench
AIME 2025
MATH-500
Humanity's Last Exam
40.6%18.6%
SciCode
53.5%45.7%
IFBench
71.0%44.6%
TerminalBench
57.6%48.5%
GPT-5.5 (medium)7 wins
0 winsClaude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is cheaper, GPT-5.5 (medium) or Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)?

Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort) is cheaper overall. Its blended price (3:1 input/output ratio) is $10.94/M tokens vs $11.25/M for GPT-5.5 (medium).

Which model performs better on benchmarks?

GPT-5.5 (medium) wins 7 out of 12 benchmarks compared to 0 for Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort). See the detailed benchmark chart above for per-category results.

Which is faster for real-time applications?

GPT-5.5 (medium) generates tokens faster at 59 tok/s vs 43 tok/s. However, Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort) has lower time-to-first-token (1.58s vs 4.21s).

When should I use GPT-5.5 (medium) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort)?

Choose based on your priorities: Claude Opus 4.6 (Non-reasoning, High Effort) for lower cost, GPT-5.5 (medium) for stronger benchmark performance, and GPT-5.5 (medium) for faster generation. For latency-sensitive apps, check the TTFT comparison above.