ClawHosters
by Daniel Samer
6 min read
Six months ago, I would have told you "just use GPT-4 for everything." That advice aged terribly. The AI model landscape in early 2026 looks nothing like it did in 2025, and if you're building or running an AI agent, picking the wrong model means you're either burning money or getting worse results than you should.
Here's our honest ai model comparison based on running agents across all four major providers.
The Big Four: What You're Actually Choosing Between
| Model | Context Window | Input Cost | Output Cost | Where It Wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | 1M (beta) | $3/MTok | $15/MTok | Computer use, general reasoning |
| GPT-5.2 | 400K in, 128K out | $1.75/MTok | $14/MTok | Math and science tasks |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | 1M (native) | $2/MTok | $12/MTok | Multimodal, long documents |
| DeepSeek V4 | 1M+ | ~$0.28/MTok | ~$0.42-$1.60/MTok | Budget, open-weight |
Those numbers tell a story. But raw specs don't matter as much as what your agent actually needs to do.
What Matters When You Choose an AI Model for an Agent
Not every benchmark translates to real-world agent performance. From what we've seen, five things actually matter:
Context window. If your agent processes long documents or needs conversation history, you need 200K+ tokens minimum. Claude and Gemini both offer 1M. GPT-5.2 caps at 400K input.
Tool calling and code execution. This is where agents live or die. Can the model reliably call functions, parse structured responses, handle multi-step tool chains? Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.2 are both strong here. Gemini is catching up fast.
Reasoning quality. For agents that make decisions (not just chat), reasoning depth matters more than speed. GPT-5.2 hit 100% on AIME 2025 math benchmarks. Claude scores 79.6% on SWE-bench coding tasks. These are close enough that your specific use case determines the winner.
Speed. A customer-facing agent that takes 8 seconds to respond loses people. DeepSeek and Gemini tend to be faster for simple queries. Claude is slower but more thorough on complex tasks.
Cost. If you're running an agent that handles 10,000 conversations a month, the difference between $0.28/MTok and $3/MTok is real money.
Our Recommendations by Use Case
We've tested all four models running actual agents on our platform. Here's what works.
Browser and computer automation: Claude Sonnet 4.6. It scored 72.5% on OSWorld, which is nearly double GPT-5.2's score. If your agent needs to click buttons, fill forms, or browse websites, Claude is the pick right now.
Math-heavy or scientific work: GPT-5.2. Perfect score on AIME 2025. If your agent does calculations, data analysis, or scientific reasoning, GPT-5.2 has a measurable edge.
Multimodal tasks (video, audio, huge documents): Gemini 3.1 Pro. Native 1M context window (not beta), plus it handles video and audio natively. Also scored 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, which shows strong generalization.
High-volume, budget-sensitive: DeepSeek V4 is 20 to 50 times cheaper than the competition. The trade-off is that benchmarks for V4 are leaked, not officially verified. If you're comfortable with that uncertainty and need to keep costs low, it's worth testing. Probably not for mission-critical agents, though.
General-purpose agent (most people): Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers the best balance of reasoning, tool calling, and context. It's not the cheapest, but the price-to-performance ratio is hard to beat for typical agent workflows.
On coding benchmarks, honestly, they're basically tied. GPT-5.2 at 80%, Claude at 79.6%, Gemini at 76.8% on SWE-bench. Don't choose based on coding scores alone.
Why Model-Agnostic Matters
Here's something I think people underestimate: the best model today probably won't be the best model in four months.
That's why we built ClawHosters to be model-agnostic. Your agent runs on our infrastructure, and switching from Claude to GPT to Gemini is a config change. Not a rebuild. Not a redeployment. One setting in your dashboard.
This matters because locking into one provider is a bet. And in a market where the leaderboard shuffles every quarter, that's a bet you don't need to make. Check out our setup guide to see how quick the switch actually is.
The Honest Answer
There's no single best ai model for ai agents. There's only the best model for YOUR agent's specific job. If I had to pick one model for a general-purpose agent today, I'd go Claude Sonnet 4.6. But I'd build the system so I could swap it out tomorrow.
That's the real advice. Don't marry a model. Date them all.
