We comprehensively evaluated 16 recent frontier VLMs - including Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol/Luna - on whether higher effort led to better docume…

We comprehensively evaluated 16 recent frontier VLMs - including Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol/Luna - on whether higher effort led to better document parsing performance. Higher effort typically leads to improvements on other benchmarks (coding, knowledge work), but up until recently it wasn't obvious that this natively improved capabilities for reading PDFs. Results: ✅ Out of the frontier models, Opus 5.5 has the best performance relative to its price. It's especially good at parsing tables. ✅ Astra is also quite good, but starts at a more expensive price than Opus. ✅ GPT-6 Luna is more compelling at the cheaper end of doc parsing If you're parsing documents at scale, you'll still want a dedicated OCR solution like LlamaParse (https://cloud.llamaindex.ai/) that has better performance at a cheaper price. But if you're parsing docs "in the agent loop" within an app like Codex/Claude code, and you're too lazy to integrate a dedicated solution, then Opus 5.5 is currently the leader. Full results on ParseBench: https://www.parsebench.ai/

Source: Jerry Liu (X) | 2026-09-26

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