Compare/Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) vs GPT-5.4 (low)

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)vsGPT-5.4 (low)

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

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)

Input
$3.75/M
Output
$15/M
Speed
62 tok/s
TTFT
58.05s
OpenAI

GPT-5.4 (low)

Input
$2.5/M
Output
$15/M
Speed
64 tok/s
TTFT
1.61s

Winner by Category

Cheaper
GPT-5.4 (low)
Faster (tok/s)
GPT-5.4 (low)
Lower Latency
GPT-5.4 (low)
Benchmarks (5-2)
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)

Pricing Comparison

MetricClaude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)GPT-5.4 (low)
Input ($/M tokens)$3.75$2.5
Output ($/M tokens)$15$15
Cost for 1M input + 100K output tokens:
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)$5.25
GPT-5.4 (low)$4.00

Speed Comparison

Output Speed (tokens/s) — higher is better
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
62 tok/s
GPT-5.4 (low)
64 tok/s
Time to First Token (seconds) — lower is better
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)
58.05s
GPT-5.4 (low)
1.61s

Benchmark Comparison

Data from Artificial Analysis API — 12 benchmarks

Intelligence Index
51.747.9
Coding Index
50.945.6
Math Index
GPQA Diamond
87.5%87.1%
MMLU-Pro
LiveCodeBench
AIME 2025
MATH-500
Humanity's Last Exam
30.0%28.9%
SciCode
46.8%50.3%
IFBench
56.6%65.9%
TerminalBench
53.0%43.2%
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort)5 wins
2 winsGPT-5.4 (low)

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) or GPT-5.4 (low)?

GPT-5.4 (low) is cheaper overall. Its blended price (3:1 input/output ratio) is $5.63/M tokens vs $6.56/M for Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort).

Which model performs better on benchmarks?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) wins 5 out of 12 benchmarks compared to 2 for GPT-5.4 (low). See the detailed benchmark chart above for per-category results.

Which is faster for real-time applications?

GPT-5.4 (low) generates tokens faster at 64 tok/s vs 62 tok/s. However, GPT-5.4 (low) has lower time-to-first-token (1.61s vs 58.05s).

When should I use Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) vs GPT-5.4 (low)?

Choose based on your priorities: GPT-5.4 (low) for lower cost, Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) for stronger benchmark performance, and GPT-5.4 (low) for faster generation. For latency-sensitive apps, check the TTFT comparison above.