Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
GPT-5.2 Instant is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 85 to 64. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
GPT-5.2 Instant's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 75.5 against 42.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 74 to 36.
GPT-5.2 Instant is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4 Sonnet is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Claude 4 Sonnet gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for GPT-5.2 Instant.
Pick GPT-5.2 Instant if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4 Sonnet only becomes the better choice if you need the larger 200K context window or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.6
Claude 4 Sonnet
57.9
GPT-5.2 Instant
75.5
Claude 4 Sonnet
42.9
GPT-5.2 Instant
93.1
Claude 4 Sonnet
79.7
GPT-5.2 Instant
90.9
Claude 4 Sonnet
71.8
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.8
Claude 4 Sonnet
56.8
GPT-5.2 Instant
95
Claude 4 Sonnet
83
GPT-5.2 Instant
94.4
Claude 4 Sonnet
82.1
GPT-5.2 Instant
97.2
Claude 4 Sonnet
76.1
GPT-5.2 Instant is ahead overall, 85 to 64. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 74 and 36.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.8 versus 56.8. Inside this category, HLE is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 75.5 versus 42.9. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 97.2 versus 76.1. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 90.9 versus 71.8. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.6 versus 57.9. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 93.1 versus 79.7. Inside this category, OfficeQA Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 95 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 94.4 versus 82.1. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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