Claude Haiku 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra

Claude Haiku 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal language model from Anthropic and the smallest member of the Claude 5.5 family, released on October 7, 2026 after Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. It accepts text and image input and returns text, with a 1M token context window and up to 128K output tokens per request. It is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort parameter: adaptive thinking is on by default and the model decides how much to reason, steered by effort levels from low to max with medium as the default. Its training data cutoff is June 2026. Pricing starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens, which Anthropic reports is about 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests in that range.

Anthropic positions Haiku 5.5 for high-volume, latency-sensitive work such as classification, extraction, routing, summarization, and subagent tasks, and describes it as its fastest model to date at standard speed. On visual and agentic evaluations reported at launch, it scores 46.4% on Chartography, a chart reading benchmark, compared with 6.4% for Haiku 4.5 and 61.6% for Sonnet 5.5, and 72.4% on the offline subset of OSWorld 2.1, a screenshot driven computer use benchmark, compared with 15.7% for Haiku 4.5. It uses the same tokenizer as Claude Opus 4.7 and later models, so the same text counts as roughly 30% more tokens than on Haiku 4.5.

GPT-6 Astra is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from OpenAI that accepts text and image input and produces text output. It is positioned as the company's flagship system for long-horizon end-to-end work spanning complex reasoning, software engineering, computer use, browsing, research and document creation. The model exposes a graduated reasoning effort control with low, medium, high, xhigh and max settings, and it accepts a change to that setting partway through a conversation rather than only at request time. It launches as a single tier with no smaller mini or nano variants, carries a context window of roughly 1.05 million tokens with a maximum output of 128,000 tokens, and reports a knowledge cutoff of April 30, 2026.

OpenAI reports evaluation results across agentic, scientific and security benchmarks, including 96.0% on GPQA Diamond, 64.6% on Terminal-Bench Science, 72.6% on OSWorld 2.0, and a perfect score on ExploitBench, along with near saturation on FrontierMath Tier 4 and ARC-AGI-3. The model supports computer use, structured outputs, streaming, programmatic tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, prompt caching and persisted reasoning, and it keeps earlier context windows searchable so it can recover requirements or tool outputs from previous turns. OpenAI describes Astra as the first of its models to cross the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework.