GPT-5.4 Thinking vs Claude Opus 4.6

Comprehensive comparison between OpenAI's GPT-5.4 Thinking and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6. Compare pricing, performance, features, and user reviews.

reasoning ai comparisongpt thinking vs claude

GPT-5.4 Thinking

OpenAI

GPT-5.4's reasoning variant with adjustable thinking depth. Replaces GPT-5.2 Thinking (deprecated June 2026). Supports four effort levels from 'low' to 'xhigh' for balancing speed vs reasoning depth. Available for Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers.

$2.5/$15per M tokens
Details

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

Anthropic's flagship model with 1M token context (beta), adaptive thinking, and the highest agentic coding scores. Introduced Agent Teams for parallel autonomous coding. Nearly doubled ARC-AGI-2 score over Opus 4.5 (68.8% vs 37.6%).

$5/$25per M tokens
Details

Specs Comparison

SpecificationGPT-5.4 ThinkingClaude Opus 4.6
Context Window1050K1000K
Max Output128K128K
Input (per 1M tokens)$2.50$5.00
Output (per 1M tokens)$15.00$25.00
Reasoning
Open Source

Scenario Score Comparison

Coding
92
vs
96
Writing
—
vs
91

GPT-5.4 Thinking

Pros

  • + Adjustable reasoning effort levels
  • + Strong on complex problem-solving
  • + Unified model (no separate Codex needed)
  • + Native computer use + reasoning combined

Cons

  • − Higher latency at xhigh effort
  • − Reasoning tokens count toward output cost
  • − GPT-5.2 Thinking users must migrate by June 2026

Claude Opus 4.6

Pros

  • + Highest SWE-bench score (80.8%)
  • + 128K max output (doubled from 4.5)
  • + Adaptive thinking with effort levels
  • + Agent Teams for parallel coding
  • + Best instruction following in complex contexts

Cons

  • − 2x price of GPT-5.4
  • − Response prefilling removed (breaking change)
  • − 1M context in beta only
  • − Extended thinking deprecated

Recommendation

Choose GPT-5.4 Thinking if you:

  • • Need adjustable reasoning effort levels
  • • Need strong on complex problem-solving
  • • Need unified model (no separate codex needed)

Choose Claude Opus 4.6 if you:

  • • Need highest swe-bench score (80.8%)
  • • Need 128k max output (doubled from 4.5)
  • • Need adaptive thinking with effort levels

Based on scores across 2 scenarios, Claude Opus 4.6 performs better overall.

GPT-5.4 Thinking Details Claude Opus 4.6 Details

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