BenchLeader

Claude Opus 4.5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash

Verdict
  • Claude Opus 4.5 (thinking) and Gemini 3.6 Flash are level on quality (60.7 vs 60.8).
  • Claude Opus 4.5 (thinking) is stronger in agents & tools, coding, instruction following, maths, reasoning.
  • Gemini 3.6 Flash is stronger in composite, knowledge, long context, multimodal.
  • Gemini 3.6 Flash is 6.7× cheaper ($1.50 vs $10.00 per 1M blended).
  • Gemini 3.6 Flash streams 4.3× faster (194 vs 45 tokens per second).
MetricClaude Opus 4.5 (thinking)Gemini 3.6 Flash
BenchLeader Index60.760.8
Agents & tools score74.6
Coding score56.449.8
Composite score65.872.4
Instruction following score54.8
Knowledge score61.074.7
Long context score65.266.6
Maths score64.054.8
Multimodal score58.067.8
Reasoning score58.6
Blended price $/M$10.00$1.50
Output speed45 tok/s194 tok/s
Time to first answer17.3 s16.8 s
Context window200k1.0M
FrontierCode34.4%
ProofBench36.0%
Epoch Capabilities Index154.3
AA Intelligence Index29.134.3
IFBench58.0%
AA-LCR77.3%80.0%
MMMU-Pro74.0%83.2%
AA-Omniscience1422.1
Terminal-Bench Hard47.0%
GPQA Diamond (AA)86.6%92.8%
Humanity's Last Exam (AA)30.1%40.8%
SciCode (AA)53.4%
τ²-Bench Telecom (AA)89.5%
AIME (Vals)95.4%
LiveCodeBench83.7%
MMLU-Pro87.3%
IOI20.3%
LegalBench84.6%
CorpFin65.1%
TaxEval74.9%
MedQA95.9%
MGSM95.2%
SWE-bench (Vals)76.4%
GPQA Diamond (Vals)85.9%
AIME 202696.7%
HMMT February 202689.4%
MathArena Apex26.0%
MultiChallenge59.0%
PRBench Finance46.2%
PRBench Legal44.2%
VISTA46.4%
MultiNRC48.6%
TutorBench51.2%
Kagi LLM Benchmark80.2%
ARC-AGI-180.0%
ARC-AGI-237.6%

Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.

Claude Opus 4.5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash: questions

Is Claude Opus 4.5 better than Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Claude Opus 4.5 (thinking) and Gemini 3.6 Flash are level on quality (60.7 vs 60.8). The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Gemini 3.6 Flash is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
Is Claude Opus 4.5 better than Gemini 3.6 Flash for coding?
Claude Opus 4.5 scores higher in coding (56 vs 50 on the category index, where 50 is average).
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash is cheaper: $1.50 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
Which is faster, Claude Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash streams faster: 194 against 45 output tokens per second.
Which has the larger context window?
Gemini 3.6 Flash accepts more context: 1.0M against 200k tokens.