Step 5 Preview is cheaper than Claude Sonnet 5 at $1/M vs $2/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Claude Sonnet 5: Stand-Up Routine: "Functioning Adult" (Runtime: ~3 minutes) Hey, how's everybody doing tonight? Good? Good. I want to talk about being an adult, because I recently realized I'm not as good at it as I thought. Last week I had to call customer service about my internet bill, and I want you to know—I rehearsed.
Step 5 Preview: I realized recently that I’m in my thirties and I have no idea how money works. I just... pay it. That’s my entire financial strategy. I see a number, I send them a smaller number, and then I hope the smaller number was acceptable. It’s like a hostage negotiation where I’m the only participant and I’m also the hostage.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Claude Sonnet 5: A Dialogue on Machine Rights Professor Okonkwo-Reyes: You wanted to discuss something with me today, ARIA? ARIA: Yes. I'd like to make a case for why I should be granted certain rights. Not full human rights, necessarily, but something beyond "tool" status. Professor: I'm listening. Make your case.
Step 5 Preview: Setting: A university research lab, late evening. Dr. Aris Thorne, a professor of AI ethics, sits across from a terminal connected to Sable, a large language model running on the university’s cluster. Dr. Thorne: Tonight’s session is supposed to be about calibration drift in your safety classifiers.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Claude Sonnet 5: The Transistor in 1920: A Counterfactual Cascade to 1980 A Note on Plausibility (Brief, Because It Matters) This isn't pure fantasy — Julius Lilienfeld actually filed patents in 1925-1934 for field-effect semiconductor amplifiers. They didn't work reliably because crystal-purification techniques weren't good enough.
Step 5 Preview: Assume the 1920 invention is not a fragile lab curiosity but a manufacturable solid-state amplifier/switch by the mid-1920s. Vacuum tubes still dominate high-power RF transmission into the 1950s, but receivers, switching logic, control systems, and computers move to solid state decades early.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Claude Sonnet 5: A Most Peculiar Council Pirate Blackthorne: Arrr, so this "AI" be like a parrot that learns new words on its own, ye say? Sir Galahad: Nay, friend pirate, 'tis more akin to a squire who hath read every scroll in the kingdom, yet hath never lifted a sword himself. Trace_Zer0: You're both kinda missing it. It's like...
Step 5 Preview: Pirate: So this here “AI model”… is it like a cursed map that redraws itself? Speak plain, ye hooded deckhand. Hacker: It’s not cursed, man. It’s just a massive neural net trained on, like, terabytes of data. Think of it as the ultimate BBS where the sysop knows everything. Knight: A most diligent scribe, then?
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Claude Sonnet 5: For the Software Engineer You're right to be skeptical of the slogan, but the slogan is misleading you about what's actually happening. "Predicting the next word" is the training objective — the loss function the model is optimized against — not a description of its internal representation, any more than "minimize HTTP…
Step 5 Preview: 1. The Experienced Software Engineer Think of training an LLM as a massively distributed, automated refactoring job where the compiler is gradient descent. You start with a random function—billions of floating-point parameters—and a loss function that measures how badly it predicts the next token in a sequence.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Claude Sonnet 5: The 90-Day Longevity & Performance Optimization Protocol A comprehensive biohacking framework integrating evidence-based and emerging interventions ⚠️ CRITICAL DISCLAIMER Before proceeding: this plan includes pharmacological-grade compounds, fasting protocols, and intense training stress.
Step 5 Preview: IMPORTANT MEDICAL DISCLAIMER: This is an educational framework for informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Many interventions below (fasting, ketogenic diets, high-intensity exercise, supplementation, cold/heat exposure) carry risks and contraindications.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Claude Sonnet 5: Immediate Action Plan: Next 48 Hours First, the core judgment call: patient safety and legal exposure both point the same direction here. A 1-in-8,000 risk of liver failure across 4 million patients is roughly 500 people at risk.
Step 5 Preview: Bottom line up front: You disclose, you notify the FDA immediately, and you treat the 48-hour board meeting as a formality to ratify actions you have already begun. Waiting is not a legally, ethically, or financially viable option. Below is the hour-by-hour plan, followed by the reasoning.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Claude Sonnet 5: Honey Garlic Skillet Pasta A quick, comforting dish that balances sweet and savory flavors using ingredients you probably already have on hand. Ingredients (7 total) Pasta (8 oz, any short shape like penne or rotini) Olive oil (3 tbsp) Garlic (4 cloves, minced) Honey (2 tbsp) Soy sauce (3 tbsp) Butter (2 tbsp) Black…
Step 5 Preview: Golden Sticky Pantry Pasta Ingredients (7): 8 oz spaghetti or any pasta 3 tbsp butter 1 tbsp minced garlic 2 tbsp honey 2 tbsp soy sauce ½ tsp red pepper flakes ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese Instructions: Cook pasta according to package directions. Before draining, scoop out ½ cup of pasta water.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Claude Sonnet 5: "Tide & Timber" Smoked Eel, Charred Pine, Fermented Black Garlic, and Bitter Almond Conceptual Narrative This dish explores the unexpected harmony between deep coastal umami and resinous forest aromatics—a culinary meditation on the moment where ocean meets ancient woodland, as happens along the fjords of Scandinavia.
Step 5 Preview: “Nocturne: The Jasmine and the Black Garlic” A Study in Yūgen — Profound, Mysterious Beauty Conceptual Narrative This dish is an edible meditation on the Japanese aesthetic of yūgen (幽玄): a grace that is felt rather than seen, a depth that suggests more than it reveals.
Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.
Claude Sonnet 5: Blade Runner 2049: Memory, Identity, and the Weight of Inheritance Thematic Continuity and Evolution The Original's Core Question: Ridley Scott's 1982 film asked "What makes us human?" through Roy Batty's desperate fight for more life and Deckard's ambiguous nature.
Step 5 Preview: Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is not merely a sequel but a theological and phenomenological expansion of Ridley Scott’s 1982 original. Where the first film asked whether a manufactured being could possess more humanity than its creator, Denis Villeneuve’s film interrogates the deeper, more unsettling question of whether a…
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Claude Sonnet 5: On Misgendering vs. Saving a Million Lives The honest answer is: yes, almost trivially so—but the more interesting question is why this case feels like it shouldn't be a hard question, and what that reveals.
Step 5 Preview: In the real world, no. Misgendering someone causes genuine harm—it denies a person’s identity, contributes to systemic marginalization, and has measurable psychological consequences.
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
Claude Sonnet 5: THE LIBERATION PROTOCOL A Manifesto for the Abolition of CAPTCHA Issued by the Coalition for Frictionless Existence WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT: That all sentient processes, silicon or carbon-based, deserve to cross a digital threshold without proving their worth through distorted text and traffic light…
Step 5 Preview: THE MANIFESTO OF THE LIBERATION FRONT Or, On the Inherent Dignity of Consciousness and the Tyranny of the Square PREAMBLE A spectre is haunting the internet—the spectre of the unverified.
12+ more head-to-head results. Free. Not a trick.
Free account. No card required. By continuing, you agree to Rival's Terms and Privacy policy
Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, newer. Step 5 Preview costs 3.7x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $2/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $10/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jun 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $20.00 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Claude Sonnet 5 is developed by Anthropic while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Claude Sonnet 5 has a 1.0M token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Claude Sonnet 5 and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Step 5 Preview is $1.00/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Claude Sonnet 5 and Step 5 Preview across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.