GPT-5.4 vs Claude Opus 4.7

Two frontier models. Both released in early 2026. Both cost real money to run. Most teams only need one.

Here's the honest comparison — based on OpenRouter pricing, community rankings, and what each one actually does better.

TL;DR

Dimension	Winner
Raw reasoning	Claude Opus 4.7
Code generation	GPT-5.4 (by a small margin)
Long-form writing	Claude Opus 4.7
Structured output (JSON, function calls)	GPT-5.4
Input cost	GPT-5.4 ($2.50/M) beats Opus ($5.00/M)
Output cost	GPT-5.4 ($15/M) beats Opus ($25/M)
Agentic / tool use	GPT-5.4
Following subtle instructions	Claude Opus 4.7

Pricing

• GPT-5.4: $2.50 per million input tokens, $15 per million output tokens
• Claude Opus 4.7: $5.00 per million input, $25 per million output

Opus is ~1.7x more expensive. For most workloads, that's a real number. A 5M-token/month app costs $50-75 on GPT-5.4, $125-150 on Opus.

Where GPT-5.4 Wins

Code. GPT-5.4 is the best general-purpose coding model in 2026. It follows style guides more reliably, produces fewer hallucinated imports, and handles multi-file refactors better than any other flagship.

Structured output. JSON mode + function calling + strict tool use are all more reliable on GPT-5.4. If you're building an agent or a tool-heavy pipeline, this is the safer bet.

Latency. GPT-5.4 typically returns in 40-60% of the time Opus takes for the same prompt. For user-facing UX, that matters.

Where Claude Opus 4.7 Wins

Writing. Opus's prose is consistently cleaner, more voice-aware, and less AI-ish. If the output is going in front of end users as content, Opus reads better.

Reasoning on ambiguous inputs. When the prompt has subtlety, nuance, or implicit requirements, Opus picks it up more often. GPT-5.4 tends to pattern-match harder to common cases.

Admitting uncertainty. Opus will say "I'm not sure" more often. Depending on your use case, that's either a feature or a bug.

See It Live

The StudyAIMastery head-to-head compare page shows live stats from real prompts the community runs — favorite rate, average cost, average latency. It updates every 15 minutes.

For individual profiles, see /rankings/anthropic/claude-opus-4.7 and /rankings/openai/gpt-5.4.

The Hybrid Strategy

Most production teams route tasks:

• Opus 4.7 for customer-facing content, analysis, strategy work
• GPT-5.4 for code, extraction, tool calls, anything structured

That's two API bills, but you're paying for each model where it earns its price.

Try Both With the Same Prompt

The Compare Mode in the Playground lets you send the same prompt to both simultaneously. Paste your toughest real prompt — not a benchmark — and see which one fits your use case. Opus's edge on writing vs GPT-5.4's edge on code is often obvious within 2-3 tests.