Gemini 3.8 Flash is the best AI for summarising PDFs for most people. It reads PDFs natively — including tables, charts and scanned pages — holds a million tokens, and costs $0.75 per million input tokens, so summarising a stack of reports is cheap and fast. When a summary has to be accurate enough to act on — a contract, a policy, a paper you will cite — Claude Sonnet 5.5 is more careful about what the document actually says.
The safest summarizing pdfs default, the cheaper option worth trying first, and the specialist pick — before you read the detail below.
Gemini 3.8 Flash is the strongest answer here for summarizing pdfs — pick it when quality of output matters more than the $0.75/1M/1M input you pay for it.
Claude Haiku 5.5 handles the same job for about 87% less per token. Start here and only move up if the output is not good enough.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the fastest of these for summarizing pdfs — worth it when latency is what the reader notices, not the last few points of reasoning depth.
Gemini 3.8 Flash is the best everyday PDF summariser — native PDF input, 1M tokens, low cost.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the better pick when the summary must be accurate enough to act on.
Claude Haiku 5.5 handles bulk summaries of shorter files at a fraction of the cost.
Use Gemini 3.8 Flash for reports, papers and multi-file summaries.
Use Claude Sonnet 5.5 for contracts, policies and anything where a misread clause matters.
Use Claude Haiku 5.5 when you are summarising many short documents and cost leads.
Switch the scoring lens to see whether the summarizing pdfs answer changes when cost, speed, or long-document depth leads the decision.
Anthropic / Balanced / Oct 10, 2026
Near-Opus 5.5 quality on scoped work at half the price.
Ranks models by the broadest mix of coding, writing, research, and long-context usefulness.
The work is long, ambiguous and multi-step — Anthropic positions Opus 5.5 for exactly that — or you need the lowest possible price, where Haiku 5.5 costs a twentieth as much.
Where the summarizing pdfs recommendation shifts once you weigh price or latency differently.
Google's fast agentic workhorse — strong coding at Flash pricing.
Near-Opus 5.5 quality on scoped work at half the price.
Anthropic's budget model, now with adjustable reasoning, at $0.10/$0.50.
Near-Astra capability at Sol pricing — OpenAI's value pick.
List prices and published scores — the numbers this page's pick is built from.
| Model | Input | Output | Est. month | Context | Speed | Coding | Writing | Research |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle | $0.75/1M | $3.75/1M | $15 | 1M tokens | Very fast | 92 | 86 | 89 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5Anthropic | $2.00/1M | $10.00/1M | $40 | 1M tokens | Fast | 98 | 98 | 95 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic | $0.10/1M | $0.50/1M | $2.00 | 1M tokens | Very fast | 86 | 84 | 82 |
| GPT-6.1 SolOpenAI | $2.00/1M | $10.00/1M | $40 | 1.1M tokens | Balanced | 98 | 94 | 97 |
Scores out of 100 — how we evaluate models. “Est. month” is 10M in / 2M out at list price: a ceiling, no discounts.
Why each one is on the shortlist for summarizing pdfs, what it is genuinely good at, and where we would steer you away from it.
The default answer for summarizing pdfs — 92/100 on the coding axis, and the model we would start with unless the price below rules it out.
Google's September 2, 2026 Flash model, positioned as the agentic workhorse of the Gemini 3 family — stronger coding and terminal work than 3.7 Flash at the same $0.75/$3.75 price.
You need long single responses (65K output cap) or your workload is output-heavy enough that its verbosity erases the per-token saving.
The fastest capable model in its price range. Gemini 3.8 Flash is the pick for multimodal and terminal-heavy agent work on a budget; just measure cost per task, not per token, because it writes a lot.
Full pricing, benchmark table and release notes on the Gemini 3.8 Flash page.
Here for latency: it answers fastest of anything listed for summarizing pdfs, at 98/100 on coding.
Anthropic's September 28, 2026 Sonnet — built for well-scoped everyday work like features, bug fixes, documents, slides and spreadsheets, priced at $2/$10 and close to Opus 5.5 on most of Anthropic's launch rows.
The work is long, ambiguous and multi-step — Anthropic positions Opus 5.5 for exactly that — or you need the lowest possible price, where Haiku 5.5 costs a twentieth as much.
The model most people should default to in the Claude lineup. Sonnet 5.5 lands within a few points of Opus 5.5 on most of Anthropic's launch rows, beats it on Terminal-Bench 4.0, and costs half as much. Step up to Opus 5.5 only when the task is open-ended and long.
Full pricing, benchmark table and release notes on the Claude Sonnet 5.5 page.
Where most budgets should land for summarizing pdfs — about 87% less per token than Gemini 3.8 Flash, and still 86/100 on the coding axis.
Anthropic's budget model, now with adjustable reasoning, at $0.10/$0.50. Full Claude Haiku 5.5 review →
Also worth a look for summarizing pdfs, at 98/100 on the coding axis.
Near-Astra capability at Sol pricing — OpenAI's value pick. Full GPT-6.1 Sol review →
UseRightAI recommendations are based on practical decision factors people actually feel in day-to-day use.
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For summarizing pdfs, Gemini 3.8 Flash (Google) is our pick. Google's fast agentic workhorse — strong coding at Flash pricing. It costs $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens, with a 1M-token context window — enough headroom for all but the largest summarizing pdfs jobs. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the closest alternative if it doesn't fit your setup.
Because the work it is built for overlaps closely with summarizing pdfs: terminal and coding agents — Google reports 90.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, up from 81.6% for 3.7 Flash and video, image and PDF understanding in one 1M-context call. The fastest capable model in its price range. Gemini 3.8 Flash is the pick for multimodal and terminal-heavy agent work on a budget; just measure cost per task, not per token, because it writes a lot.
On a moderate month — 10M input and 2M output tokens — Gemini 3.8 Flash runs about $15.00 at list price, with no batch or caching discounts applied, so treat that as a ceiling. Claude Haiku 5.5 is the cheaper route at roughly $2.00 for the same volume, if summarizing pdfs is high-volume enough for price to lead the decision.
Verbose: Artificial Analysis needed 120M output tokens to run its index against a 71M median, so cost per task runs above the sticker price. 65K max output — half of what Claude and OpenAI's current models allow. Avoid it if you need long single responses (65K output cap) or your workload is output-heavy enough that its verbosity erases the per-token saving. None of that rules it out for summarizing pdfs on its own — but if one of those limits maps onto how you actually work, take the alternative on this page seriously rather than defaulting to the top pick.
Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.1/1M input is the budget option here. Anthropic's budget model, now with adjustable reasoning, at $0.10/$0.50. Expect a quality step down on the hardest cases — the usual pattern is to route routine summarizing pdfs volume to Claude Haiku 5.5 and keep Gemini 3.8 Flash for the work where a wrong answer is expensive.