Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs GPT-5.6 Terra (Max)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) by OpenAI? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 40.80
Total cost: $622

OpenAIGPT-5.6 Terra (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 42.10
Total cost: $2501

Verdict

Depends on your budget

GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) scores 1.3 points higher (42.1 vs 40.8) but costs 4.0× as much to run the benchmark ($2501 vs $622; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) when you need intelligence above 40.8, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… when 40.8 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)	GPT-5.6 Terra (Max)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	40.8	42.1	+3.2% GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) is 3.2% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$622.28	$2,500.72	+301.9% GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) is 4.0× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	6.13s	110.99s	+1710.6% GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) is 1710.6% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$2.00 / $12.0
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 3.2% more intelligence, 301.9% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 1710.6% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): what beats it GPT-5.6 Terra (Max): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.
GPT-5.6 Terra (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 53.60 for $2172.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)GPT-5.6 Terra (Max)Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/gpt-5-6-terra · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/gpt-5-6-terra?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill