OpenAI vs Claude Pricing: Which AI Models Are Cheaper in 2026?
OpenAI vs Claude API pricing compared for 2026. GPT-5.6 Luna, Terra and Sol versus Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 5, Opus 5 and Fable 5 — real cost per 1,000 requests, long-context pricing, caching and Batch.
OpenAI and Anthropic now offer broadly comparable model ranges.
Each company has a lower-cost model for high-volume work, a general production model, a premium reasoning model and a frontier option for the most difficult tasks.
The pricing comparison is less straightforward than comparing the headline rates.
OpenAI has a substantial advantage at the budget end of the market.
Claude is slightly cheaper in the general tier, where Anthropic made Sonnet 5's $2 and $10 rates permanent on 10 August 2026.
OpenAI took the premium tier on 21 August 2026, when it cut GPT-5.6 Sol to a promotional $4 input and $20 output per million tokens, available at least until 21 November 2026.
Claude also has an important advantage for very large prompts.
OpenAI applies higher rates when GPT-5.6 and GPT-6 Astra requests exceed 272,000 input tokens — 2x input and cache rates and 1.5x output rates for the entire request — while Claude 4.6 and later models include their full one-million-token context window at the normal rate.
This article compares first-party API rates.
It does not compare ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions, negotiated enterprise discounts or prices charged through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud and other partner platforms.
For the full single-provider breakdowns, see the OpenAI pricing comparison and the Claude pricing comparison .
OpenAI vs Claude pricing at a glance The clearest comparison between the latest model families is: Model tier OpenAI model Input per 1M Output per 1M Claude model Input per 1M Output per 1M Budget GPT-5.6 Luna $0.20 $1.20 Claude Haiku 4.5 $1.00 $5.00 General GPT-5.6 Terra $2.00 $12.00 Claude Sonnet 5 $2.00 $10.00 Premium GPT-5.6 Sol $4.00 $20.00 Claude Opus 5 $5.00 $25.00 Frontier GPT-6 Astra $10.00 $50.00 Claude Fable 5.1 $10.00 $50.00 Highest Claude tier GPT-5.6 Sol* $4.00 $20.00 Claude Fable 5.1 $10.00 $50.00 *GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 are compared as each company's widely available frontier model, but this does not establish that they offer equal performance.