# Claude Opus 4.8 can be 10x faster than OpenAI GPT-5

> Source: <https://www.peterbe.com/plog/claude-opus-is-10x-faster-than-openai-gpt-5-at-non-streaming-completions>
> Published: 2026-07-24 19:41:49+00:00

This picture summarizes it well:

Here on my blog, for [this popular blog post](/plog/blogitem-040601-1) I get a lot of comments. 28k blog comments over the years. Some of them are terribly written and hard to understand, so I let AI suggest a rewrite. That code that sends the blog post comment to AI, I actually fire off three times: once with OpenAI `gpt-5`

, once with OpenAI `gpt-5-mini`

, and once with Claude `claude-opus-4.8`

. I use my human eyes and judgement to evaluate the results, and I can tell you they do equally well. Only the slightest differences.

The surprising thing is how amazingly slow OpenAI's `gpt-5`

is! It's nearly 10x slower than `claude-opus-4.8`

. What's up with that!?

It's also clear that the latency difference between `gpt-5-mini`

and `gpt-5`

is significant. At the time of writing, the input token price difference between `gpt-5.4`

and `gpt-5.4-mini`

is $2.50 compared to $0.75! That's a 3x difference.

[Conclusion](#conclusion)

-
If you're constructing a prompt the API, use Claude.

-
If you have to use OpenAI, consider the

`mini`

model because it's*both*cheaper*and*faster.

[Bonus](#bonus)

Before I added Claude, I used to use `litellm`

to wrap OpenAI's models. The code looks like this:

```
response = litellm.completion(
    model="openai-gpt-5",
    api_key=settings.OPENAI_API_KEY,
    messages=my_prompt_messages,
)
```

Unlike, if you use the native OpenAI Python SDK the invocation looks like this:

```
client = openai.OpenAI(api_key=settings.OPENAI_API_KEY)
response = client.responses.create(
    model="gpt-5,
    input=my_prompt_messages,
)
```

I measured the difference, in speed, where I compare using the OpenAI SDK versus the `litellm`

wrapper and the difference looks like this:

Granted, in June I "only" did a bit over 30 of these calls, but strangely there's a difference!

I don't have the intricate knowledge to understand why the `litellm`

makes the total time different from using the SDK. (not sure I care either!)

Either way, I'm moving away from `litellm`

and only use the SDKs provided by Claude and OpenAI. Feels safer given the CVEs we've seen this year on `litellm`

.