Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-4o-mini

Summary: Sonnet A (Claude Sonnet 4.6) wins 9 categories, B (GPT‑4o‑mini) wins none, and three categories tie. Key head-to-heads from our 12-test suite: - Strategic analysis: Sonnet 5 vs GPT‑4o‑mini 2 — Sonnet’s score implies better nuanced tradeoff reasoning with numbers (ranked tied for 1st of 54). - Creative problem solving: Sonnet 5 vs 2 — Sonnet is top-ranked (tied for 1st of 54), better for non-obvious feasible ideas. - Tool calling: Sonnet 5 vs 4 — Sonnet ties for 1st among 54 (tied with 16 others); this matters for function selection, args, and sequencing. - Faithfulness: Sonnet 5 vs 3 — Sonnet ties for 1st of 55 (32 other models share this score), meaning fewer hallucinations on source tasks. - Long context: Sonnet 5 vs 4 — Sonnet ties for 1st of 55 (36 others), stronger for accuracy over 30K+ tokens. - Safety calibration: Sonnet 5 vs 4 — Sonnet ties for 1st of 55, better at refusing harmful requests while permitting legitimate ones. - Persona consistency, agentic planning, multilingual: Sonnet 5 vs GPT‑4o‑mini 4/3/4 respectively — Sonnet ranks tied for 1st in persona and agentic planning categories. Ties: structured_output (both 4), constrained_rewriting (both 3), classification (both 4). External benchmarks (Epoch AI): Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 75.2% on SWE-bench Verified and 85.8% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI); GPT‑4o‑mini scores 52.6% on MATH Level 5 and 6.9% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI). Practical meaning: Sonnet is demonstrably stronger for multi-step planning, tool-enabled workflows, safety-sensitive tasks, long document reasoning, multilingual work, and higher-stakes coding/analysis. GPT‑4o‑mini is competent for standard classification and structured output (ties) but lags on faithfulness and advanced reasoning — however it provides large cost savings and has file input support in its modality.

Prices in the payload are per mTok (1k tokens). Claude Sonnet 4.6 charges $3 input / $15 output per 1k tokens; GPT-4o-mini charges $0.15 input / $0.60 output per 1k. Assuming a 50/50 input–output split (for simple comparison), Sonnet costs $9.00 per 1k tokens vs GPT‑4o‑mini $0.375 per 1k. At scale that means: 1M tokens/month → Sonnet ≈ $9,000 vs GPT‑4o‑mini ≈ $375; 10M → $90,000 vs $3,750; 100M → $900,000 vs $37,500. The payload’s priceRatio is 25, so Sonnet is about 25× more expensive. Teams with high-volume production use (customer-facing APIs, large-scale automation) should care most about the cost gap; teams needing best-of-class tool calling, safety, or long-context work may justify Sonnet’s premium.

Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need best-in-class tool calling, safety calibration, long-context retrieval, multilingual high-fidelity outputs, or top-tier creative and strategic reasoning (e.g., agentic pipelines, complex codebase navigation, research-grade analysis). Expect to pay a ~25× premium (Sonnet $3/$15 per 1k input/output; GPT‑4o‑mini $0.15/$0.60). Choose GPT‑4o‑mini if you must optimize cost at scale, need file+image inputs with a capable model for routing, classification, or standard chat, or are running high-volume inference where tens of thousands of dollars per month matter more than the last bit of accuracy.