Anthropic vs OpenAI: Token Pricing, Speed & Intelligence
Full comparison of Anthropic and OpenAI — live token pricing, latency, throughput, context window, strengths, weaknesses, and best use cases. Updated July 2026.
Anthropic
Claude — safety-focused frontier AI with exceptional coding ability
Anthropic builds the Claude model family, known for long context windows (up to 200K tokens), strong coding performance, and a safety-first design philosophy. Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet lead on many coding and reasoning benchmarks. Prompt caching is available at significant discounts.
OpenAI
GPT-4o, o3, and the world's most widely-used AI API
OpenAI is the creator of the GPT model family and the ChatGPT product. Their API provides access to frontier models including GPT-4o, the o-series reasoning models, and the GPT-4.1 long-context family. Pricing is competitive for frontier-tier capability, with prompt caching available on most models.
Key metrics
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Live token pricing
Strengths & weaknesses
Anthropic
OpenAI
Key differentiators
Frequently asked questions
Anthropic FAQs
How much does the Anthropic Claude API cost?
Claude 4 Opus costs $15/1M input and $75/1M output tokens. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is $3/$15 per 1M tokens. Claude Haiku 3.5 is the budget option at $0.80/$4.00. Prompt caching reduces input costs by up to 90%.
What is the context window for Claude models?
All Claude models support a 200,000-token context window, making them ideal for processing long documents, codebases, or multi-turn conversations without truncation.
How does Anthropic prompt caching work?
Anthropic's prompt caching lets you mark portions of your prompt (system prompts, documents, tool definitions) to be cached server-side. Cached tokens are billed at 10% of the standard input price after the first write, making repeated long-context calls dramatically cheaper.
OpenAI FAQs
How much does the OpenAI API cost?
GPT-4o costs $2.50/1M input tokens and $10/1M output tokens. GPT-4o-mini is $0.15/$0.60 per 1M tokens. Prompt caching cuts input costs by 50% on eligible requests.
What is the difference between GPT-4o and o3?
GPT-4o is a fast, multimodal model optimised for chat, vision, and coding. o3 is a reasoning model that uses chain-of-thought to solve complex problems — it is slower and more expensive but significantly more capable on math, science, and hard coding tasks.
Does OpenAI support prompt caching?
Yes. Prompt caching is available on GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, o3, and o4-mini. Cached input tokens are billed at 50% of the standard input price, making long-context and repeated-system-prompt workloads significantly cheaper.
Provider resources
Anthropic — Claude — safety-focused frontier AI with exceptional coding ability
Anthropic builds the Claude model family, known for long context windows (up to 200K tokens), strong coding performance, and a safety-first design philosophy. Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet lead on many coding and reasoning benchmarks. Prompt caching is available at significant discounts.
Claude 4 Opus scores highest on coding benchmarks among all frontier models, with a 200K context window and aggressive prompt caching.
OpenAI — GPT-4o, o3, and the world's most widely-used AI API
OpenAI is the creator of the GPT model family and the ChatGPT product. Their API provides access to frontier models including GPT-4o, the o-series reasoning models, and the GPT-4.1 long-context family. Pricing is competitive for frontier-tier capability, with prompt caching available on most models.
The most widely-integrated LLM API — virtually every AI framework and tool supports OpenAI natively.
Key strengths compared
Anthropic
- ▸Top coding benchmark scores (Claude 4 Opus)
- ▸200K context window on all Claude models
- ▸Aggressive prompt caching — up to 90% discount
OpenAI
- ▸Largest ecosystem & third-party integrations
- ▸Best-in-class function calling & structured outputs
- ▸Prompt caching on all major models
Provider category context
Anthropic is a frontier lab, founded in 2021. OpenAI is a frontier lab, founded in 2015. Both are frontier lab providers — the comparison is primarily about pricing, model selection, and feature differentiation within the same tier.
How to choose between them
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are frontier labs with proprietary models. Choose based on benchmark performance for your specific task: Anthropic leads on top coding benchmark scores (claude 4 opus), while OpenAI leads on largest ecosystem & third-party integrations. For cost-sensitive workloads, compare the cheapest model tier from each provider in the pricing table above — the gap between efficient-tier models is often larger than between flagship models.