Compare/Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) vs GPT-5.5 (xhigh)

Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)vsGPT-5.5 (xhigh)

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

Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)

Input
$6.25/M
Output
$25/M
Speed
49 tok/s
TTFT
12.97s
OpenAI

GPT-5.5 (xhigh)

Input
$5/M
Output
$30/M
Speed
63 tok/s
TTFT
44.14s

Winner by Category

Cheaper
Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
Faster (tok/s)
GPT-5.5 (xhigh)
Lower Latency
Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
Benchmarks (0-7)
GPT-5.5 (xhigh)

Pricing Comparison

MetricClaude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)GPT-5.5 (xhigh)
Input ($/M tokens)$6.25$5
Output ($/M tokens)$25$30
Cost for 1M input + 100K output tokens:
Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)$8.75
GPT-5.5 (xhigh)$8.00

Speed Comparison

Output Speed (tokens/s) — higher is better
Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
49 tok/s
GPT-5.5 (xhigh)
63 tok/s
Time to First Token (seconds) — lower is better
Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
12.97s
GPT-5.5 (xhigh)
44.14s

Benchmark Comparison

Data from Artificial Analysis API — 12 benchmarks

Intelligence Index
52.960.2
Coding Index
48.159.1
Math Index
GPQA Diamond
89.6%93.5%
MMLU-Pro
LiveCodeBench
AIME 2025
MATH-500
Humanity's Last Exam
36.7%44.3%
SciCode
51.9%56.1%
IFBench
53.1%75.9%
TerminalBench
46.2%60.6%
Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)0 wins
7 winsGPT-5.5 (xhigh)

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) or GPT-5.5 (xhigh)?

Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max 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 (xhigh).

Which model performs better on benchmarks?

GPT-5.5 (xhigh) wins 7 out of 12 benchmarks compared to 0 for Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort). See the detailed benchmark chart above for per-category results.

Which is faster for real-time applications?

GPT-5.5 (xhigh) generates tokens faster at 63 tok/s vs 49 tok/s. Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) also has lower time-to-first-token (12.97s vs 44.14s).

When should I use Claude Opus 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) vs GPT-5.5 (xhigh)?

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