The same TypeScript file costs 73% more tokens on Claude than on GPT

The real prices of frontier models. Tokens * Price, right?

Playcode counted tokens across 16 real fixtures using each provider's official tokenizer. The same TypeScript file becomes 681 tokens on GPT-5.x's o200k but 1,178 on Claude's new tokenizer—a 73% gap. Claude Opus 4.8 and 4.6 share the same rate card, yet the new tokenizer silently adds ~30% more tokens for identical code. English and code are hit hardest; Chinese barely changed. DeepSeek and GLM were excluded because only rough estimates were available.

Why it matters: Real-file tokenizer benchmarking turns the industry pain point of incomparable token pricing into reproducible data. All three HKR axes hit, but this is a tooling insight rather than a product launch or model breakthrough — lands in the 78-84 band. No cross-source cluster sign...