GPT-5.6 Terra vs Muse Spark 1.3

GPT-5.6 Terra is the mid-tier reasoning model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family, which also includes the flagship Sol and the lightweight Luna. Introduced in a limited preview on June 26, 2026, and made broadly available on July 9, 2026, Terra accepts text and image input and produces text output, supporting vision, function calling, tool use, and agentic workflows. It is designed as a balanced option for everyday professional and production workloads — including coding assistance, document analysis, customer support, and multi-step agent tasks — where both output quality and cost efficiency matter. OpenAI positions Terra as delivering performance competitive with GPT-5.5 at approximately half the price, with a context window of around 1,050,000 tokens. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, Terra scores 84.3%, matching Claude Fable 5 on that benchmark. Under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, Terra is rated High for cybersecurity and biological capabilities, meaning it demonstrates meaningful capability in those domains without reaching the Critical threshold.

GPT-5.6 introduces a new naming convention in which the generation number (5.6) is paired with a durable capability tier name (Sol, Terra, or Luna), allowing each tier to advance on its own schedule. Terra carries the API identifier gpt-5.6-terra and supports the same reasoning effort controls available across the family, including adjustable reasoning depth. The model includes prompt caching with explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life, with cache writes billed at 1.25x the uncached input rate and cache reads receiving a 90% discount. GPT-5.6 Terra is a proprietary, closed-weights model served through the OpenAI API, Codex, and ChatGPT.

Muse Spark 1.3 is a proprietary multimodal reasoning model from Meta Superintelligence Labs and the fourth Muse Spark release in five months, arriving on September 2, 2026. It takes text, images, video, and document files as input and returns text, and it operates over a context window of 1,048,576 tokens. Meta trains the model for long-horizon agentic work, so it carries accumulated context and prior tool results forward across many turns, reconciles messy or conflicting inputs, and asks for clarification when a task is underspecified. Visual inputs such as screenshots and video clips feed a reasoning loop that runs against a real execution environment rather than a scripted sequence of steps.

The model exposes graded reasoning effort settings. An xhigh configuration is generally available at launch, while a max reasoning configuration aimed at harder reasoning and agentic problems arrives after further safety testing. Artificial Analysis measures Muse Spark 1.3 (max) at 62 on its Intelligence Index and the xhigh configuration at 61, with agentic tool-use evaluations driving most of the gain over Muse Spark 1.2; max reaches 52% on Tau3-Bench Banking by spending more turns and reasoning tokens than xhigh. Prior Muse Spark versions emit bounding box coordinates, transcriptions, and structured field extractions from images on Roboflow Vision Evals.