Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Opus 5 Verdict
- Claude Opus 5 leads on quality: 70.0 vs 60.4.
- Claude Opus 5 is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, knowledge, maths, multimodal, reasoning.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is stronger in long context, instruction following.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 1.7× cheaper ($6.00 vs $10.00 per 1M blended).
| Metric | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 70.0 | 60.4 |
| Agents & tools score | 71.5 | 54.6 |
| Coding score | 74.5 | 57.1 |
| Composite score | 93.1 | 67.5 |
| Human preference score | 78.2 | 62.0 |
| Knowledge score | 70.6 | 62.3 |
| Long context score | 66.2 | 66.6 |
| Maths score | 67.1 | 62.7 |
| Multimodal score | 69.4 | 60.6 |
| Reasoning score | 71.5 | 65.2 |
| Instruction following score | – | 56.9 |
| Blended price $/M | $10.00 | $6.00 |
| Output speed | 51 tok/s | 42 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 93.0 s | 2.2 s |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| GPQA Diamond | 92.9% | 87.4% |
| OTIS Mock AIME | 97.8% | 85.8% |
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | – | 75.2% |
| Terminal-Bench | – | 53.4% |
| SimpleBench | 80.6% | – |
| WeirdML | 86.3% | – |
| FrontierCode | – | 24.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 162.6 | 152.3 |
| LMArena Text | – | 1472 |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | – | 1504 |
| LMArena Coding | – | 1528 |
| LMArena WebDev | – | 1521 |
| LMArena Vision | – | 1282 |
| LMArena Agent | – | -1 |
| AA Intelligence Index | 50.7 | 30.4 |
| IFBench | – | 56.6% |
| AA-LCR | 79.3% | 80.0% |
| MMMU-Pro | 84.7% | 73.3% |
| AA-Omniscience | 37.1 | 12.2 |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | – | 53.0% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 93.2% | 87.5% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 54.9% | 33.6% |
| SciCode (AA) | 56.4% | 50.1% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | – | 79.5% |
| AIME (Vals) | – | 92.3% |
| LiveCodeBench | 89.0% | 82.1% |
| MMLU-Pro | 91.6% | 87.3% |
| IOI | 91.7% | – |
| LegalBench | 87.0% | 82.1% |
| CorpFin | 73.2% | 65.3% |
| TaxEval | 75.1% | 77.1% |
| MedQA | – | 92.1% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | 84.6% | 57.3% |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | 97.0% | 77.4% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | 93.4% | 85.6% |
| Vals Index | 67.2 | 50.6 |
| MCP Atlas | – | 69.5% |
| HiL-Bench | 57.0% | – |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1385 | 1207 |
Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: questions
- Is Claude Opus 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.6?
- Claude Opus 5 leads on quality: 70.0 vs 60.4. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Opus 5 is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Claude Opus 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.6 for coding?
- Claude Opus 5 scores higher in coding (75 vs 57 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Is Claude Opus 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.6 for agentic tasks?
- Claude Opus 5 scores higher in agentic tasks (72 vs 55 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5 or Claude Sonnet 4.6?
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is cheaper: $6.00 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which is faster, Claude Opus 5 or Claude Sonnet 4.6?
- Claude Opus 5 streams faster: 51 against 42 output tokens per second.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Both accept 1M tokens of context.