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Winner

9.6

Claude Fable 5

VS

9.0

Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview

Claude Fable 5 wins this head-to-head on capability — official specs (a 128K output ceiling double Gemini's, a 1M context window, general availability since June 9, 2026) plus an early-reported 26-point SWE-Bench Pro lead (80.3% vs 54.2%, not independently verified) make it the most capable model of the pair. Gemini 3.1 Pro keeps the value crown: vendor-confirmed pricing at $2 input and $12 output per million tokens up to 200K context (five times cheaper on input), native audio and video multimodality, and the only officially documented reasoning score in the matchup (GPQA Diamond 94.3%). Best for capability-critical agentic work: Claude Fable 5. Best for cost-sensitive scale and multimodal pipelines: Gemini 3.1 Pro.

9.6

Claude Fable 5

VS

8.6

GPT-5.5

A true split verdict: capability versus value. On SWE-bench Pro — the one agentic coding benchmark with same-harness figures for both models — early third-party coverage reports 80.3% for Claude Fable 5 versus OpenAI's reported 58.6% for GPT-5.5, a 21.7-point gap, and in our first 48 hours running both side-by-side on the same production tasks, Fable 5 needed fewer human interventions on the hardest multi-file and long-horizon work. But GPT-5.5 wins price decisively — $5 input and $30 output per million tokens versus $10 and $50, both fetch-verified June 10, 2026 — posts the strongest published SWE-bench Verified figure (88.7%, a different benchmark where Fable 5 has no number), offers reasoning that can be switched fully off, and avoids Fable 5's mandatory 30-day Covered Model retention. Best for the hardest agentic work and production failure handling (refusals as HTTP 200 with auto-fallback to Opus 4.8): Claude Fable 5. Best for price, compliance flexibility, and ecosystem: GPT-5.5. Fable 5's benchmark lead is early and not independently reproduced; we scope it accordingly. No single overall winner — route frontier tasks to Fable 5 and volume to GPT-5.5.

Winner

9.6

Claude Fable 5

VS

8.6

Grok 4.3

Split verdict by workload, with the widest margins we have measured between two frontier-tier models. The capability crown goes to Claude Fable 5: it ranks number one of 152 models on the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 65 versus 53 for Grok 4.3, its reported 80.3 percent on SWE-Bench Pro is the highest of any generally available model (early reported figure, flagged as such), and in our hands-on production use it needed fewer human interventions than any model we have run. The cost-and-speed crown goes to Grok 4.3 by an enormous margin: $1.25 input and $2.50 output per million tokens against $10 and $50 for Fable 5 — eight times cheaper on input, twenty times cheaper on output, both fetch-verified from vendor docs — plus roughly 220 versus 59.4 tokens per second on the same Artificial Analysis harness and native video input and PPTX/PDF/XLSX file generation that Fable 5 does not offer. Context window is a tie at one million tokens. We did not crown a single overall winner: best for raw capability, agentic coding, and reliability-critical pipelines is Claude Fable 5; best for cost, output speed, and native multimodal work is Grok 4.3. Many teams should run both and route by task, using Fable 5's 90 percent prompt-caching discount to keep the expensive side affordable.