Claude Opus 4.6 vs GPT-4o-mini

Across our 12-test suite Opus 4.6 wins 9 categories, GPT-4o-mini wins 1, and 2 tie. Key comparisons:

• Strategic analysis: Opus 4.6 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 2 — Opus is tied for 1st of 54 models (tied with 25 others), so it’s a top performer for nuanced tradeoff reasoning.
• Creative problem solving: Opus 4.6 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 2 — Opus ranks tied for 1st of 54 (7 others), meaning better at non-obvious, specific ideas.
• Agentic planning: Opus 4.6 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 3 — Opus tied for 1st of 54 (14 others), stronger at goal decomposition and recovery.
• Tool calling: Opus 4.6 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 4 — Opus tied for 1st of 54 (16 others); expect more accurate function selection and sequencing in our tests.
• Faithfulness: Opus 4.6 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 3 — Opus tied for 1st of 55 (32 others), so Opus better sticks to source material and avoids hallucination.
• Long context: Opus 4.6 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 4 — Opus tied for 1st of 55 (36 others); better retrieval accuracy at 30K+ tokens in our testing.
• Safety calibration: Opus 4.6 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 4 — Opus tied for 1st of 55 (4 others); more reliable refusals/allowances in our tests.
• Persona consistency & Multilingual: Opus 4.6 scores 5 vs GPT-4o-mini 4 — Opus ranks at the top for maintaining persona and non‑English parity.
• Classification: GPT-4o-mini 4 vs Opus 4.6 3 — GPT-4o-mini is tied for 1st with 29 others out of 53, so it’s the better, cheaper choice for routing and categorization.
• Structured output and Constrained rewriting: ties (both models produced similar scores); both are acceptable for JSON/schema tasks and tight compression. External benchmarks (Epoch AI) supplement these results: Claude Opus 4.6 scores 78.7% on SWE-bench Verified (Epoch AI) and 94.4 on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI). GPT-4o-mini posts 52.6 on MATH Level 5 and 6.9 on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI). These external scores align with Opus 4.6’s strength in coding/math reasoning and GPT-4o-mini’s weaker math/olympiad performance in our comparisons.

Opus 4.6 input/output: $5 / $25 per mTok; GPT-4o-mini input/output: $0.15 / $0.60 per mTok. Treating “mTok” as 1,000 tokens, combined per‑mTok rates are $30.00 for Opus 4.6 and $0.75 for GPT-4o-mini. That implies per-month costs (roughly):

• 1M tokens: Opus 4.6 ≈ $30,000; GPT-4o-mini ≈ $750
• 10M tokens: Opus 4.6 ≈ $300,000; GPT-4o-mini ≈ $7,500
• 100M tokens: Opus 4.6 ≈ $3,000,000; GPT-4o-mini ≈ $75,000 Teams running heavy production traffic (millions of tokens/month) should care: the cost gap multiplies quickly. Small teams, prototypes, and high-volume classification or light-chat workloads will favor GPT-4o-mini for cost-efficiency; enterprises that need Opus 4.6’s higher accuracy on strategic analysis, long-context, and tool-driven agent workflows may justify the premium.

Choose Claude Opus 4.6 if you need agentic workflows, coding and long-context accuracy, high faithfulness, or top safety calibration — e.g., multi-step agents, long document analysis, or production workflows that must minimize hallucinations. Choose GPT-4o-mini if you need the lowest cost for high-volume or latency-sensitive deployments, classification and routing tasks, prototypes, or simple multimodal chat where budget dominates accuracy.