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Claude Sonnet 5 ($2/$10, June 30 — now permanent) beats GPT-5.5 ($5/$30, April 23) on every directly comparable benchmark: +4.6 SWE-bench Pro, +2.2 Terminal-Bench 2.1, +5.2 HLE with tools. At 60% cheaper input and 67% cheaper output. Full benchmark comparison.
Claude Sonnet 5 (63.2% Pro, $15/1M) vs Opus 4.8 (69.2%, $25/1M). Sonnet 5 beats Opus on knowledge work (GDPval 1618 vs 1615), ties on HLE with tools (57.4% vs 57.9%), and delivers 93% of Opus capability at 60% of the price. Full benchmark comparison from Anthropic's Sonnet 5 System Card.
GLM-5.2 vs GLM-5.1: the full sibling comparison. DeepSWE +28.2 (18.0→46.2), HMMT +9.9, GPQA +5.0, Pro +3.7. 200K→1M context (5×). Single→dual thinking modes. Anthropic API native. Same MIT license, same $4.40/1M. All data from Z.ai official blog.
GLM-5.2 (62.1% Pro, MIT, $4.40) vs Qwen 3.7 Max (60.6%, proprietary, $7.50). Near-ties everywhere: Pro +1.5, MCP +0.6, HLE -0.9. Qwen dominates math (GPQA 92.4%) and is the Agent Frontier (35hr autonomous). GLM is MIT open-weight. Full comparison.
GLM-5.2 (62.1% Pro, $4.40/1M) vs DeepSeek V4 Pro (55.4%, $0.87/1M). GLM leads all shared benchmarks (+6.7 Pro, +6.5 HLE, +3.4 MCP). But DeepSeek dominates competitive coding: LiveCodeBench 93.5% (#1 global), Codeforces 3206, GPQA 90.1%. Both MIT, both 1M context. Full comparison.
GLM-5.2 (62.1% Pro, MIT, $4.40/1M) vs MiniMax M3 (59.0%, open-weight, $1.20/1M). GLM leads all shared benchmarks (+3.1 Pro, +15.0 TB 2.1, +2.8 MCP Atlas). But M3 is 3.7× cheaper, multimodal (video+image+desktop), and leads BrowseComp (83.5%). Text-only powerhouse vs the Swiss Army knife. Full comparison.
Claude Opus 4.8 leads every benchmark — but GLM-5.2 is within 0.7 pts on FrontierSWE and 0.8 pts on MCP Atlas. At $4.40 vs $25 per 1M (5.7× cheaper) with MIT open weights, GLM-5.2 is the first open-weight model that makes Opus look expensive. Full 8-benchmark comparison from Z.AI & LLM Stats data.
GLM-5.2 (62.1% Pro, MIT open-weight, $4.40/1M) beats GPT-5.5 (58.6%, $30/1M) on SWE-bench Pro by 3.5 points at 1/7 the cost. Also leads HLE w/tools (+2.5), FrontierSWE (+1.8), MCP Atlas (+1.7). GPT-5.5 counters with DeepSWE (+23.8), TB 2.1 (+3.0). Full comparison with 12 shared benchmarks from Z.AI/VentureBeat data.
Claude Opus 4.8 (69.2% Pro, $25/1M) dominates every benchmark vs Kimi K2.6 (58.6%, $4/1M) by 3-11 pts. But Kimi fights back on BrowseComp (-3.9), Agent Swarm (300 sub-agents), DeepSearchQA (92.5%), and is 6.25× cheaper. Full comparison with real benchmark data, 10-point verdict.
GPT-5.5 and Kimi K2.6 are tied at 58.6% SWE-bench Pro. But Kimi leads HLE w/tools (54.0%), DeepSearchQA (+13.9), and Agent Swarm (300 sub-agents). GPT counters with OSWorld (+1.9), BrowseComp, Terminal-Bench (Codex CLI 82.7%), and 7.5× higher cost. The most evenly matched comparison of 2026.
Claude Opus 4.8 (69.2% Pro, $25/1M, AA Index #1) vs MiniMax M3 (59.0%, $1.20/1M, open-weight + video). Opus dominates 5 of 6 shared benchmarks by 8-13 points. But M3 is 21× cheaper, open-weight, and wins BrowseComp (-4.2). Full comparison with VP of VentureBeat research plus MiniMax/Minimax blog data.
GPT-5.5 (82.7% Terminal-Bench, 58.6% Pro, $30/1M) vs Gemini 3.5 Flash (83.6% MCP Atlas, 76.2% TB 2.1, $9/1M, 152 tok/s). GPT-5.5 dominates reasoning & long context. Flash dominates tool orchestration & speed. Official Google DeepMind model card data. 10-point verdict.