Model comparison

Claude Opus 4.6 vs o3-mini

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 36.7 on the Noometry Index. o3-mini costs 5.2× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 36 shared benchmarks.

Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic

58.2

Rank #20 Confirmed

o3-mini OpenAI

36.7

Rank #212 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 36 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher in 9 categories and o3-mini in 0 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 57.8 to 16.3.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is Cybench: 93% for Claude Opus 4.6 and 22.5% for o3-mini.
  • o3-mini is cheaper at $1.10 / $4.40 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.6.
  • Claude Opus 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 200K.

Side by side

Claude Opus 4.6 and o3-mini specifications
Claude Opus 4.6o3-mini
ProviderAnthropicOpenAI
Noometry Index58.236.7
Released2026-02-042024-12-20
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window1M200K
Max output128K100K
Input $ / M tokens$5$1.10
Output $ / M tokens$25$4.40
Results tracked6851

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Category by category

Coding Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20), o3-mini: 40.8 (#132)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
GSO41.2%1.3%
WeirdML78%43.7%
LMArena Coding15361378
SWE-bench Verified78.7%—
FrontierCode26.6%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)75.6%—
Aider Polyglot—60.4%
LMArena WebDev1547—
SWE-bench Multilingual72%—
SciCode—39.8%
LiveBench Coding—82.7%
CadEval—54%
ALE-Bench996.5—
AlgoTune1.47—

Agentic & Tool Use Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4), o3-mini: 29.6 (#84)

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
Cybench93%22.5%
Terminal-Bench79.8%—
APEX-Agents46.3%—
Remote Labor Index4.2%—
τ²-bench Banking27.3%—
DeepResearch Bench55.3%—
GBAEval44.1%—
LMArena Search1253—
METR Time Horizons78.9%—
Vending-Bench 28,018—

Reasoning Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.8 (#23), o3-mini: 16.3 (#305)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
ARC-AGI-269.2%3%
SimpleBench67.6%22.8%
ARC-AGI-194%34.5%
Chess Puzzles17%17%
LMArena Hard Prompts15271366
Mystery Game Puzzles25%7%
DTBench91.2%68.8%
LMCA55.8%19%
Epoch Capabilities Index155.24140.34
ForecastBench6059.6
Kagi LLM Benchmark83.6%—
NYT Connections (extended)92.1%—
CritPt—0.3%
EnigmaEval7.6%—
Thematic Generalization80.6%—
EBR-Bench12.7%—
LiveBench Reasoning—89.6%
LiveBench Data Analysis—70.6%
LiveBench—75.9%

Math Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31), o3-mini: 28.1 (#244)

Knowledge Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26), o3-mini: 38.3 (#146)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
GPQA Diamond90.5%77%
SimpleQA Verified47%15.3%
LMArena Expert15461364
Humanity's Last Exam34.4%—
Confabulations—17.9%
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.2%—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74), o3-mini: —

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
LMArena Vision1316—
Furniture Assembly28.3%—
LMArena Document1507—

Multilingual Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6), o3-mini: 45.7 (#164)

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
LMArena Non-English14891319
LMArena Chinese15511379
LMArena French15131334
LMArena German15021303
LMArena Japanese14841286
LMArena Korean14641314
LMArena Russian14971304
LMArena Spanish15101321

Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4), o3-mini: 75.1 (#72)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
LMArena Instruction Following15231337
LiveBench Instruction Following—84.4%

Long Context Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13), o3-mini: 33.8 (#256)

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
LMArena Longer Query15201343
Fiction.LiveBench—50%
CL-bench20.7%—
CL-bench Life17%—

Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10), o3-mini: 50.3 (#182)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6o3-mini
LMArena Text15031337
LMArena Creative Writing15051286
LMArena Multi-Turn15131320
Short-Story Creative Writing—61.7%
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1809—
EQ-Bench 41223—
LiveBench Language—50.7%

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than o3-mini?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 36.7 on the Noometry Index. o3-mini costs 5.2× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or o3-mini?

o3-mini is cheaper. It lists at $1.10 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.6 lists at $5 and $25.

Is Claude Opus 4.6 or o3-mini better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.2 versus 40.8 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 200K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.6 and o3-mini share?

36 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.6 has 68 scored results on Noometry and o3-mini has 51.

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