Quick answer
- Data verified
- July 18, 2026
- Claude lineup
- Fable 5 · Opus 4.8 · Sonnet 5 · Haiku 4.5
- OpenAI lineup
- GPT-5.6 Sol · Terra · Luna · GPT-5.5
- Everyday defaults
- Opus 4.8 or Terra; Fable 5 or Sol for the hardest work
Every current model, one table
Every generally available Claude and GPT coding model as of July 18, 2026, with pricing from vendor docs and headline benchmark scores from the sources cited in each row. Model names link to our deep-dive pages where we have them.
| Model | Vendor | Price | Context | Tier | Released | Headline benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5 | Anthropic | $10 in / $50 out per MTok | 1M tokens (128k output) | frontier | June 9, 2026 | SWE-bench Verified: 95.0% |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Anthropic | $5 in / $25 out per MTok (Fast mode $10/$50) | 1M tokens | flagship | May 28, 2026 | SWE-bench Verified: 88.6% |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic | $3 in / $15 out per MTok (Intro pricing $2/$10 through Aug 31, 2026) | 1M tokens (default) | workhorse | June 30, 2026 | — |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Anthropic | $1 in / $5 out per MTok | 200k tokens | fast | October 2025 | — |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | OpenAI | $5 in / $30 out per MTok | Not published | frontier | July 9, 2026 | Terminal-Bench 2.1: 88.8% |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | OpenAI | $2.5 in / $15 out per MTok | Not published | workhorse | July 9, 2026 | Terminal-Bench 2.1: 87.4% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | OpenAI | $1 in / $6 out per MTok | Not published | fast | July 9, 2026 | Terminal-Bench 2.1: 84.7% |
| GPT-5.5 | OpenAI | $5 in / $30 out per MTok | Not published | flagship | April 23, 2026 | SWE-bench Verified: 88.7% |
The two lineups explained
Anthropic and OpenAI structure their families differently, and misunderstanding the naming is how people end up on the wrong model. Anthropic uses named tiers: Fable is the frontier tier (introduced June 9, 2026 as the first Mythos-class model above Opus), Opus is the flagship, Sonnet the mid-tier workhorse, Haiku the fast/cheap tier. Higher tier means more capability and more dollars per token.
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family works on two axes: the number is the generation, the name is the capability tier. Sol, Terra, and Luna are all GPT-5.6-generation models released the same day (July 9, 2026); Sol is the flagship and the only tier with max reasoning effort and ultra mode, Terra is the workhorse, Luna the budget tier. GPT-5.5 is the previous generation's flagship, still available, and per OpenAI's launch materials Terra now roughly matches it at about half the price.
Claude: tiers by name
GPT-5.6: generation + tier
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How to choose: match the model to the task shape
Stop asking which model is best and start asking what shape the task is. The same four shapes come up in every codebase, and each has a clear pick in both lineups:
Hard architecture and refactors
Everyday feature work
Volume and cost pressure
Subagents and mechanical edits
For the within-vendor decision in detail, see the best Claude model for coding and the best Codex model. For the head-to-head at the top, Fable 5 vs Sol.
Benchmarks, honestly
Read vendor benchmark charts with one rule in mind: each vendor publishes the benchmark it wins. Anthropic leads SWE-bench Verified, where Fable 5 scores 95.0% per the swebench.com leaderboard, verified July 18, 2026. OpenAI leads Terminal-Bench 2.1, where Sol scores 88.8% per OpenAI's launch materials (91.9% in ultra mode). Both claims are true. Neither settles anything on its own.
The most useful cross-vendor signal right now is SWE-bench Pro, because the Sol number comes from third-party runs rather than OpenAI's marketing: Fable 5 scores 80.3% (Anthropic / Scale leaderboard) against 64.6% for Sol (third-party runs (not OpenAI-published)). That is a real gap on repository-level software engineering, and it is the main reason we treat Fable 5 as the strongest coding model available today.
Use them together, not either/or
The teams getting the most out of these models do not pick a side. They run Claude models through Claude Code and GPT-5.6 models through Codex CLI, and route each task to whichever model fits its shape and budget, Fable 5 on the migration, Terra on the CRUD endpoints, Haiku on the subagents.
That routing is exactly what AIDEN is built for: a macOS desktop app that orchestrates your existing Claude Code and Codex CLIs on one kanban board. Each story card gets an AI-drafted spec you approve, its own git worktree, and whichever agent, Claude or Codex, you assign to it, running locally on the keys you already pay for (BYOK, free for one project). See how the workflow ranks against the field in the best agentic IDEs of 2026.