API

GPT-5 Turbo — OpenAI’s fast, efficient variant marketed as GPT-5 mini and later GPT-5.4 mini — delivers native multimodal input (images and audio in a single API call), strict JSON structured outputs, and 400K-token context at roughly $0.15 per million input tokens. It is the practical choice for production applications where cost and latency matter more than raw intelligence ceiling. What Is GPT-5 Turbo? OpenAI’s Fast, Multimodal Model Explained GPT-5 Turbo refers to the fast, cost-optimized tier of OpenAI’s GPT-5 family — officially shipped as GPT-5 mini (August 7, 2025) and its successor GPT-5.4 mini (March 17, 2026). Just as GPT-4 Turbo was the speed-and-price-optimized version of GPT-4, GPT-5 Turbo is the developer-friendly workhorse of the fifth generation. GPT-5.4 mini runs more than 2x faster than the original GPT-5 mini while approaching flagship GPT-5.4 performance on reasoning and coding benchmarks. The model supports text, images, and audio natively — no add-on vision API, no separate speech-to-text pipeline. Context window reaches 400K tokens, more than 3x the 128K cap on GPT-4o mini. Pricing sits at approximately $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens. For developers building RAG pipelines, voice assistants, or document-parsing agents, GPT-5.4 mini hits the sweet spot between the budget Gemini Flash tier and the premium GPT-5.5 flagship. The result is a model that most real-world production apps can actually afford to run at scale. ...

Z.ai is Zhipu AI’s international developer platform, offering access to the GLM model family — including GLM-5.1, the first open-weight model to top the SWE-bench Pro leaderboard — via OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible APIs. Coding Plan subscriptions start at $10/month, making it the cheapest frontier-adjacent coding setup available in 2026. What Is Z.ai? Zhipu AI’s International Developer Platform Explained Z.ai is the international-facing developer API platform operated by Zhipu AI, a Beijing-based AI lab founded in 2019 as a spinout from Tsinghua University. The platform exposes Zhipu’s GLM (General Language Model) series to developers worldwide through two API compatibility layers: an OpenAI-compatible endpoint at https://api.z.ai/api/openai/v1 and an Anthropic-compatible endpoint at https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic — making Z.ai the only provider besides Anthropic itself that offers a true Anthropic API drop-in replacement. Zhipu AI trained the GLM models without Nvidia hardware, a geopolitical differentiator as export restrictions tighten in 2026. The platform offers free models (GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash) for prototyping, quota-based Coding Plan subscriptions for Claude Code users, and direct per-token billing for production workloads. As of May 2026, GLM-5.1 scores 58.4% on SWE-bench Pro, edging out GPT-5.4 (57.7%) and Claude Opus 4.6 (57.3%). For developers who need frontier-adjacent coding performance without the $200/month Claude Max bill, Z.ai is the most cost-effective path. ...

The Perplexity Sonar API lets you add live web search and inline citations to any app using a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint. You get grounded, up-to-date answers with source links — no separate search API, no custom scraping pipeline — starting at $1 per million tokens. What Is the Perplexity Sonar API? The Perplexity Sonar API is a search-first AI inference service that automatically retrieves live web results before generating each response, embedding citations directly into the output. Unlike OpenAI or Anthropic models that ground answers in training data, Sonar queries the live web on every request — making it purpose-built for applications that need current information, not just general reasoning. Pricing starts at $1 per million tokens (input and output combined) for the standard Sonar model, with no extra per-query search fee bundled on top. In a 2026 production benchmark, Sonar delivered inline citations on 94% of test queries with latency consistently under 2 seconds. The API endpoint is fully OpenAI-compatible, meaning any application already calling GPT-4 or Claude can switch to Sonar by changing the base URL and model name — no SDK migration required. This drop-in compatibility, combined with a search-first architecture, is what separates Sonar from general-purpose models with optional grounding add-ons. ...

Grok 4 launched in Q2 2026 as xAI’s flagship reasoning model, positioned against Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 at a competitive $3.50 per million tokens for API access — significantly cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7’s input pricing or GPT-5.5’s $5/million input tokens. The 2M+ context window is the headline spec: processing an entire large codebase or a full book in a single prompt without chunking. The grok-code-fast variant adds a specialized tokenizer optimized for programming tasks. xAI built Colossus — a 100,000+ H100/H200 GPU cluster — specifically for Grok 4’s training, which reflects both the ambition and the resources behind this model. Here’s an honest technical assessment of what Grok 4 delivers versus its benchmarks. ...

GPT-6 is OpenAI’s next flagship model — pre-training completed on March 24, 2026 at the Stargate facility in Abilene, Texas, but the model has not shipped to the public as of May 2026. What’s confirmed, what’s projection, and what every developer building on the OpenAI API needs to know right now. What Is GPT-6? (And Why It’s Not What Most People Think) GPT-6 is OpenAI’s next-generation flagship language model, positioned as a significant architectural leap beyond GPT-5 and GPT-5.5. It is not simply an incremental update — OpenAI’s internal roadmap treats GPT-6 as the first model built from the ground up around long-term memory, multi-step agentic workflows, and a two-tier inference system that pairs fast System-1 responses with deliberate System-2 verification. Pre-training completed on March 24, 2026, using over 100,000 liquid-cooled H100 and B200 GPUs at the Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas — a $500B infrastructure bet funded by Microsoft, SoftBank, and Oracle. What most coverage gets wrong is conflating GPT-6 with GPT-5.5. The model known internally as “Spud” was widely expected to launch as GPT-6, but OpenAI shipped it as GPT-5.5 on April 23, 2026. GPT-6 is now the model beyond that — a distinction that matters for developers forecasting API migration timelines and capability planning through 2026. ...

Claude Opus 4.7, released April 16, 2026, silently removed budget_tokens from its extended thinking API. Any code that passes budget_tokens to Opus 4.7 receives an immediate 400 Bad Request error. The fix is a four-step migration: switch to adaptive thinking type, replace budget_tokens with the effort parameter, update agentic loops to use task_budget, and strip temperature, top_p, and top_k. This guide walks through each step with exact before/after code. What Changed in Claude Opus 4.7: budget_tokens Is Gone Claude Opus 4.7 removed budget_tokens entirely from the extended thinking configuration, replacing it with an adaptive thinking system that automatically allocates reasoning compute based on task complexity. The change affects every application that previously used thinking: { type: "enabled", budget_tokens: N } to control how much the model “thinks” before responding. Released April 16, 2026, Opus 4.7 also removes temperature, top_p, and top_k parameters — three additional fields that silently accepted values in 4.6 but now return 400 errors in 4.7. Pricing remains unchanged at $5/M input tokens and $25/M output tokens, and the model shows a 13% coding benchmark lift over Opus 4.6 on Anthropic’s internal 93-task evaluation. For teams upgrading by changing only the model string, these breaking changes arrive without warning in production — there is no deprecation header or soft-failure mode in the API response before the hard 400 begins. ...

GPT-5.5’s hosted shell and apply_patch tools let you run autonomous coding agents that explore filesystems, execute commands, and apply precise code edits — all inside an OpenAI-managed Debian 12 sandbox with no infrastructure to maintain. What Are OpenAI’s Compute Tools? Hosted Shell and Apply Patch Explained OpenAI’s compute tools are two purpose-built capabilities in the Responses API that give models direct access to code execution environments and structured file-editing primitives. The hosted shell tool provisions an ephemeral Debian 12 container where GPT-5.5 can run arbitrary shell commands — installing packages, running test suites, inspecting file trees, and producing downloadable artifacts via /mnt/data. The apply_patch tool gives the model a structured way to propose file modifications using the V4A diff format, which supports create_file, update_file, and delete_file operations with surgical precision. Together, these two tools form a closed loop: the model explores a codebase with shell commands, identifies what needs to change, and applies those changes via structured patches — without the host application needing to interpret or re-execute diffs. As of April 2026, these tools are only available through the Responses API (not the Chat Completions API) and require GPT-5.5 or compatible models. The combination represents OpenAI’s most direct answer to Claude Code, GitHub Copilot Agent, and similar agentic coding platforms. ...

The OpenAI Responses API is the new primary interface for building stateful, agentic AI applications — replacing the Assistants API (being sunset H1 2026) and extending beyond what Chat Completions can do. This tutorial walks through everything from your first API call to building multi-step agents with built-in tools like web search and file retrieval. What Is the OpenAI Responses API? The OpenAI Responses API is a stateful, tool-native interface for building AI agents and multi-turn applications — launched in March 2025 as OpenAI’s replacement for the Assistants API and a significant evolution beyond Chat Completions. Unlike Chat Completions, which is stateless (every request requires you to resend the full conversation history), Responses API maintains conversation state server-side using previous_response_id. A 10-turn conversation with Chat Completions resends your entire history on turn 10, making it up to 5x more expensive for long dialogues. Responses API sends only the new message each turn — the server already holds context. Built-in tools (web search at $25–50/1K queries, file search at $2.50/1K queries) are first-class citizens rather than custom function definitions, and reasoning tokens from o3 and o4-mini are preserved between turns instead of being discarded. OpenAI has moved all example code in the openai-python repository to Responses API patterns — it is where the platform is going. ...