GPT-5.6 Terra
GPT-5.6 Terra
The middle of OpenAI's range, and the one most teams should actually deploy.
Updated
The read
Terra keeps the million-token context and most of Sol's competence, then costs a fraction of it. It is the balanced member of the family: quick enough for product work, strong enough for the reasoning most applications actually contain, and backed by the deepest tooling ecosystem of any model in this index. Nothing about it is remarkable, which is the compliment.
Where it shines
- Best-supported model in the industry: every framework ships an adapter
- Million-token context at a mid-tier price
- Predictable structured output, which matters more than benchmarks in production
Worth knowing first
- Beaten on both quality and price by models at either end of its own family
- Closed weights, so nothing here can be run on your own hardware
Index score
84.4
Provisional. This score is read from the product's public capability, not from the one-prompt rebuild the fully reviewed entries went through, so treat it as a placing rather than a verdict.
- Rank
- 11 of 53
- Builds
- LLMs
- Category
- Frontier
- Output
- Text, code and tool calls over an API
- Pricing
- Paid only
- Best for
- General product work that needs a dependable frontier model
Scores are our own editorial judgement, weighted craft 55, speed 10, control 15 and value 20.
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