Claude Opus 5 vs Step 5 Preview
Claude Opus 5 
Step 5 Preview Verdict
- Claude Opus 5 (high) leads on quality: 70.2 vs 65.0.
- Claude Opus 5 (high) is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, knowledge, maths, multimodal.
- Step 5 Preview is stronger in long context, reasoning.
- Step 5 Preview is 7.0× cheaper ($1.43 vs $10.00 per 1M blended).
| Metric | Claude Opus 5 (high) | Step 5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 70.2 | 65.0 |
| Agents & tools score | 66.0 | – |
| Coding score | 71.9 | – |
| Composite score | 90.2 | 84.4 |
| Human preference score | 69.7 | – |
| Knowledge score | 80.3 | 72.0 |
| Long context score | 65.9 | 70.8 |
| Maths score | 72.3 | – |
| Multimodal score | 67.6 | 60.8 |
| Reasoning score | 75.6 | 82.1 |
| Blended price $/M | $10.00 | $1.43 |
| Output speed | 54 tok/s | – |
| Time to first answer | 16.7 s | – |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Terminal-Bench | 50.3% | – |
| OSWorld-Verified 2.0 | 29.0% | – |
| SciCode | 54.3% | – |
| WeirdML | 91.6% | – |
| LMArena Text | 1493 | – |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1517 | – |
| LMArena Coding | 1533 | – |
| LMArena WebDev | 1660 | – |
| LMArena Vision | 1321 | – |
| LMArena Agent | 10.2 | – |
| AA Intelligence Index | 48.2 | 43.6 |
| AA-LCR | 79.0% | 88.3% |
| MMMU-Pro | 82.4% | 76.4% |
| AA-Omniscience | 33.7 | 16.4 |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 93.7% | – |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 52.8% | 46.5% |
| SciCode (AA) | 55.4% | 58.9% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 97.5% | – |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 88.3% | – |
| ARC-AGI-3 | 30.2% | – |
| CritPt | 28.3% | 20.9% |
| GDPval (AA) | 56.5% | 53.6% |
| τ²-Bench Banking (AA) | 44.7% | – |
| LMArena Maths | 1525 | – |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1474 | – |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1499 | – |
| LMArena Multi-turn | 1484 | – |
| LMArena Longer Queries | 1508 | – |
| LMArena Document | 1490 | – |
| DeepSWE | 72.8% | – |
| CursorBench | 66.7% | – |
| ALE-Bench | 2164.6 | – |
Data as of 2026-09-19. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Opus 5 vs Step 5 Preview: questions
- Is Claude Opus 5 better than Step 5 Preview?
- Claude Opus 5 (high) leads on quality: 70.2 vs 65.0. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Opus 5 (high) is ahead overall as of 2026-09-19, but check the category scores for your use.
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5 or Step 5 Preview?
- Step 5 Preview is cheaper: $1.43 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Both accept 1M tokens of context.