Anthropic vs OpenAI for Coding agent / code generation (Oct 2026)
Depot Pick for this job: Anthropic. OpenAI is a ranked runner-up. Both have a sourced price in usd_per_million_input_tokens, so this comparison is like for like on price. Prices are each provider's lowest sourced SKU in that unit only (no blending across units, input/output or context tiers), not quality-adjusted.
Scores as of 2026-10-19 / 2026-09-14 (8 / 43 days; stale after 30). Prices carry their own dates.
| Anthropic (Depot Pick) | OpenAI | |
|---|---|---|
| Job-weighted overall | 8.42 | 8.22 |
| Capability fit | 9.7 | 9.6 |
| Price / performance | 6.8 | 6.2 |
| Latency / reliability | 8.7 | 8.8 |
| Developer & agent DX | 9.2 | 9.5 |
| Privacy / data retention | 9 | 7.8 |
| Lock-in risk (higher = worse) | 6.5 | 7.2 |
| Maturity / track record | 9.4 | 9.8 |
| Lowest sourced SKU (usd_per_million_input_tokens) | $0.1 (Haiku 5.5 (prompts up to 100K tokens)) source · as of 2026-10-27 · re-checked 2026-10-27 | $0.1 (gpt-6-luna) source · as of 2026-10-03 · re-checked 2026-10-27 |
| Free option for this job | none listed | none listed |
| Score kind / confidence | curated_estimate / high | curated_estimate / high |
When not to use Anthropic
Compliance blocks Anthropic; or you need cheapest high-volume codegen (DeepSeek/open hosts) with human review.
Lock-in
Stored lock-in risk (0–10, higher = more lock-in): Anthropic 6.5, OpenAI 7.2. Self-host fallback for this job: SWE-bench, Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct, Terminal-Bench.
Agents: GET /api/compare?providers=anthropic,openai&jtbd=coding-agent · full job page · methodology