Claude Sonnet 5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol

Claude Sonnet 5 is a mid-tier large language model from Anthropic, released on June 30, 2026, as the latest model in the Sonnet series and a direct successor to Claude Sonnet 4.6. It is a hybrid reasoning model designed primarily for agentic workflows, software coding, and professional tasks. The model features a 1 million token context window, a 128k maximum output token limit, and runs adaptive thinking by default, giving API users fine-grained control over reasoning effort across five levels (low, medium, high, max, and extra-high). It uses an updated tokenizer shared with Opus 4.7 and later models, which produces approximately 30% more tokens for equivalent text compared to earlier Claude models. On benchmarks, Sonnet 5 scores 63.2% on agentic coding and 81.2% on OSWorld, narrowing the gap with Opus 4.8 while remaining at Sonnet-tier pricing.

The model supports text and image input with text output, and accepts tools including browsers and terminals for autonomous multi-step task execution. Anthropic's safety evaluations report that Sonnet 5 shows a lower rate of undesirable behaviors than Sonnet 4.6 and is generally safer in agentic contexts, with improved resistance to prompt injection and reduced sycophancy. Cybersecurity safeguards equivalent to those on Opus 4.7 and 4.8 are active, though Anthropic notes the model was not deliberately trained on cybersecurity tasks. The model is proprietary and API-only, with no open weights.

GPT-6.1 Sol is a reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-6 series that accepts text and image input and returns text. It is an upgrade to GPT-6 Sol positioned to approach the intelligence of the larger GPT-6 Astra model on agentic coding, computer use, and professional knowledge work. The model exposes an adjustable reasoning effort control, ranging from low settings for simple turns to maximum settings for harder tasks, and can be driven with tool use enabled or disabled. It operates over a context window of roughly one million tokens and emits up to 128,000 output tokens in a single response, which supports long-running agent loops over large codebases and multi-document collections. Audio and video inputs are not supported.

On the visual side, the model is evaluated on GDP.pdf, a benchmark that asks professional questions about complex PDF documents containing tables, charts, diagrams, and fine-print details, and on OSWorld 2.0, which measures agents operating graphical computer applications. OpenAI reports that GPT-6.1 Sol performs on par with or better than GPT-6 Sol across its image input safety evaluations, and that the share of responses containing a factual error at low reasoning effort falls from 11.4 percent to 7.7 percent.