GPT-5.4 Review 2026: Features, Pricing, Benchmarks Compared

OpenAI Just Dropped GPT-5.4 — Here’s Everything You Need to Know

In this GPT-5.4 review, we dive into everything about the model OpenAI released on March 5, 2026, and it’s already shaking up the AI landscape. As the latest entry in the GPT-5 series, it brings configurable reasoning, computer use capabilities, and benchmark scores that rival Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6.

Whether you’re a developer deciding if it’s worth the upgrade from GPT-5.3 Codex, or a business evaluating AI tools for 2026, this comprehensive review covers everything: features, pricing, real-world benchmarks, and honest comparisons.

What’s New in GPT-5.4?

GPT-5.4 isn’t just a minor iteration — it introduces several game-changing capabilities:

1. Configurable Reasoning Effort (5 Levels)

This is the standout feature. For the first time, developers can control how deeply the model thinks before responding. GPT-5.4 offers five reasoning levels:

None — No chain-of-thought. Perfect for simple lookups and classification tasks. Lowest cost.
Low — Minimal reasoning. Great for summarization and data extraction.
Medium — Balanced mode. The sweet spot for most general-purpose tasks.
High — Deep multi-step analysis with self-correction. Ideal for complex debugging.
xHigh — Maximum reasoning depth with verification. Reserved for mathematical proofs and critical code reviews.

This per-request control is a genuine architectural advantage — you can dynamically adjust reasoning based on query complexity, optimizing both cost and quality in the same application.

2. Computer Use API

GPT-5.4 introduces OpenAI’s first Computer Use API, allowing the model to:

See your screen through screenshots
Move the cursor and click on elements
Type text and navigate applications
Execute multi-step workflows (filing reports, configuring settings, running test suites)

If you’ve used Anthropic’s Computer Use with Claude, the concept is similar — but GPT-5.4 adds the benefit of reasoning effort controls on top. Note: this is a first-generation feature, so expect some latency and occasional misclicks on dense UIs.

3. 272K Context Window

A significant jump from GPT-5.3 Codex’s 200K tokens. The larger context window means you can load bigger codebases, longer documents, and more conversation history into a single session — critical for enterprise and development use cases.

4. Improved Coding Performance

GPT-5.4 scores approximately 80% on SWE-bench Verified, up from 75.2% on GPT-5.3 Codex. That puts it within striking distance of Claude Opus 4.6’s 80.8% — a gap so small it’s practically noise in real-world applications.

GPT-5.4 Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?

Here’s the pricing breakdown and how it compares to competing models:

GPT-5.4: $10/1M input tokens, $30/1M output tokens (272K context)
GPT-5.3 Codex: $2/1M input, $8/1M output (200K context)
Claude Opus 4.6: $15/1M input, $75/1M output (200K context)
Claude Sonnet 4.6: $3/1M input, $15/1M output (200K context)
DeepSeek V4: $2.19/1M input, $8.78/1M output (128K context)

Key insight: GPT-5.4 is less than half the cost of Claude Opus 4.6 for output tokens ($30 vs $75), while delivering comparable performance. For high-volume applications, this pricing advantage adds up fast.

Benchmark Showdown: GPT-5.4 vs The Competition

Coding Benchmarks

SWE-bench Verified: GPT-5.4 (~80.0%) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (80.8%) vs GPT-5.3 Codex (75.2%) vs DeepSeek V4 (70.4%)
HumanEval: GPT-5.4 (95.1%) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (94.6%) — GPT-5.4 takes the lead here
MBPP+: GPT-5.4 (89.7%) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (90.2%) — nearly identical

Reasoning Benchmarks (xHigh Effort)

GPQA Diamond: GPT-5.4 (74.8%) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (75.2%)
MATH-500: GPT-5.4 (97.2%) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (96.8%) — GPT-5.4 edges ahead
ARC-AGI: GPT-5.4 (62.1%) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (59.4%) — notable lead for GPT-5.4

The bottom line: these two models are neck-and-neck across virtually every benchmark. Your choice should come down to pricing, specific features, and use case requirements.

GPT-5.4 vs GPT-5.3 Codex: Should You Upgrade?

Upgrade if:

You need computer use capabilities
Configurable reasoning depth matters for your pipeline
You need a longer context window (272K vs 200K)
You want the highest possible coding accuracy

Stay on GPT-5.3 Codex if:

Speed and cost are your top priorities ($2/$8 vs $10/$30 per million tokens)
You’re building a coding-focused pipeline
You don’t need agentic features

Both models remain supported — GPT-5.3 Codex isn’t going anywhere.

GPT-5.4 vs Claude Opus 4.6: The Real Comparison

This is the matchup everyone’s watching in March 2026.

Where GPT-5.4 wins:

Pricing — Significantly cheaper at scale ($30 vs $75 per million output tokens)
Reasoning controls — 5 configurable levels vs Claude’s standard mode
Context window — 272K vs 200K tokens
ARC-AGI benchmark — 62.1% vs 59.4%

Where Claude Opus 4.6 wins:

SWE-bench — 80.8% vs 80.0% (small but consistent lead)
Multi-file refactoring — Still best in class for large codebases
Computer Use maturity — Anthropic shipped this feature earlier and has refined it more
Instruction following — Slightly more reliable with complex, multi-constraint prompts

Our verdict: For most developers and businesses (see also our best AI coding tools roundup), GPT-5.4 offers better value. For critical software engineering tasks where every percentage point matters, Claude Opus 4.6 retains a slight edge. Many teams will benefit from using both — GPT-5.4 for high-volume work, Claude Opus 4.6 for critical code reviews.

How to Get Started with GPT-5.4

Getting started takes just minutes:

API Access: Sign up at platform.openai.com and use model ID gpt-5.4
ChatGPT: Available to Plus ($20/mo), Pro ($200/mo), and Enterprise subscribers
SDK: Run pip install openai --upgrade to get the latest Python SDK

Start with reasoning_effort="medium" for general tasks, and adjust up or down based on your needs.

Final Thoughts

GPT-5.4 is a serious contender for the best AI model of early 2026. The configurable reasoning effort alone makes it architecturally interesting for production systems, and the pricing advantage over Claude Opus 4.6 is hard to ignore.

Is it perfect? No. The computer use API is still first-generation, and Claude Opus 4.6 edges it out on some coding benchmarks. But for the price-to-performance ratio, GPT-5.4 is tough to beat.

If you’re building AI-powered applications in 2026, GPT-5.4 deserves a spot in your evaluation. The AI race just got even more competitive — and that’s great news for everyone.

GPT-5.4 Review 2026: Features, Pricing, Benchmarks & Is It Worth Upgrading?