Claude Opus 5 (max) vs GPT-5.6 Sol (high)
Should you write with Claude Opus 5 (max) or GPT-5.6 Sol (high)? On this page the only thing that changes is the model. Both wrote their own version of the scripts behind 10 of my What's AI videos, five drafts per script, and three judges from three model families scored every draft blind, with my finished script as the reference. Claude Opus 5 (max) leads overall, 89.4 to 87.6. Heads-up: Claude Opus 5 (max) and GPT-5.6 Sol (high) both share a model line with one of the judges. The panel spans three model families, so no model here is scored by its own family alone (how the panel works).
The verdict
This is a real trade-off, and I'd still go with Claude Opus 5 (max effort), #8 on the board against #33. Opus wins on the parts that score how human the script sounds, three to four points ahead on Hook Strength and Tone & Voice Match. GPT-5.6 Sol (high) takes three metrics back: Visual Cue Quality by almost five points, plus small edges on Length Adherence and the Slop Score. It's also about half the price per script and a bit faster. For cue-heavy explainers where you'll add the personality yourself, GPT is a fair pick. For voice, Opus.
Pick Claude Opus 5 (max effort) when the hook and the voice are what the script depends on.
Pick GPT-5.6 Sol (high) for cheaper, cleaner, cue-heavy scripts where you'll add the personality.
How to read these numbers
Overall vs Elo. Overall is the weighted rubric score. Elo compares each model's five-draft average with every other model's, script by script, and counts gaps inside run-to-run noise as draws, so it rewards winning often and can disagree with overall. My own scripts score 90.9 on the same rubric, not a literal 100. Right now 2 of 167 ranked configurations reach it. A model above that line writes at that level on this rubric. That's not the same as beating my script line for line.
Reading the Elo intervals. Each 95% range comes from resampling every model's recorded run scores on each task and re-ranking. Comparing these separate ranges does not test the Elo gap between two models: far apart is strong evidence, and overlap isn't a tie. The tasks stay fixed, so the ranges say nothing about new tasks (the long version).
Metric by metric: where the gap comes from
Blue is Claude Opus 5 (max), orange is GPT-5.6 Sol (high), and the solid bar takes the metric. The weight under each name is how much it counts toward the overall. Weighted by how much each metric counts, Tone & Voice Match does the most to put Claude Opus 5 (max) ahead: it leads there by 3.1 points. If you care about one thing, say voice or length, go straight to that row.
Cost, speed, and consistency
Quality is half the decision. The other half is what each script costs you, how long you wait, and how often you get a bad draft. The lead has a price: Claude Opus 5 (max) costs about 1.9x as much per script as GPT-5.6 Sol (high).
| Claude Opus 5 (max) | GPT-5.6 Sol (high) | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall / 100 | 89.4 | 87.6 |
| Writing Elo | 2354 | 2134 |
| Score spread across drafts (± overall std) | 1.190 | 1.330 |
| Cost per script (USD) | 0.293 | 0.155 |
| Avg time per script (min) | 2.2 | 1.4 |
| Open weights | No | No |
Green wins the row, and for spread, cost and time, lower wins. Cost is one script at recorded list prices, uncached and without judging, so your real bill will differ. Spread is how much the overall score moves across a model's drafts, and time is the average time to get one accepted script, retries included.
Want the script-by-script detail? Full scorecards: Claude Opus 5 (max) · GPT-5.6 Sol (high). The whole scoring pipeline is on the methodology page.
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