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Claude Opus 4.6 vs GPT-3.5 Turbo

Side-by-side API pricing and Artificial Analysis performance for Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic) and GPT-3.5 Turbo (OpenAI). Green cells mark the better value in each row.

Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC · refreshed hourly

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

GPT-3.5 Turbo

OpenAI

Pricing
Input $/1M$5.00$0.50
Output $/1M$25.00$1.50
Blended $/1M (3:1)$10.00$0.75
RAG example (30K in / 2K out)$0.2$0.018
Quality & speed
Intelligence Index37.83.6
Coding Index10.7
Agentic Index
Output speed (tok/s)57152
Time to first token1.85s0.78s
Specs
Context window1M16K
Input modalitiestext, image, filetext

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or GPT-3.5 Turbo?

GPT-3.5 Turbo has the lower blended API price at $0.75 per 1M tokens (3:1 input:output mix), versus $10.00 for the other model. Prices are live from OpenRouter and refresh about hourly.

Which is better for RAG workloads?

For a typical RAG request (30K input / 2K output tokens), GPT-3.5 Turbo costs about $0.018 per request versus $0.2. Also compare context windows: Claude Opus 4.6 offers 1M and GPT-3.5 Turbo offers 16K.

Which scores higher on Artificial Analysis benchmarks?

Claude Opus 4.6 leads on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (37.8 vs 3.6). Check coding and agentic indices on this page for workload-specific tradeoffs.