Claude vs GPT-4o for OCR.

GPT-5.4 holds the best OCR edit distance on OmniDocBench at 0.02. Claude has the lowest hallucination rate on CC-OCR at 0.09%. The question is which matters more: raw accuracy or reliability.

Test document set. Mixed quality, various fonts, some handwriting.

The code.

Claude Sonnet 4.6

import anthropic
client = anthropic.Anthropic(api_key="your-key")
with open("document.png", "rb") as f:
    image_data = base64.b64encode(f.read()).decode()
message = client.messages.create(
    model="claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {
                "type": "image",
                "source": {
                    "type": "base64",
                    "media_type": "image/png",
                    "data": image_data
                }
            },
            {
                "type": "text",
                "text": "Extract all text from this image."
            }
        ]
    }]
)
print(message.content[0].text)

GPT-5.4

import openai
client = openai.OpenAI(api_key="your-key")
with open("document.png", "rb") as f:
    image_data = base64.b64encode(f.read()).decode()
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {
                "type": "image_url",
                "image_url": {
                    "url": f"data:image/png;base64,{image_data}"
                }
            },
            {
                "type": "text",
                "text": "Extract all text from this image."
            }
        ]
    }],
    max_tokens=4096
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)