# Claude 2.1 vs gpt-oss-120b

> gpt-oss-120b is the stronger model overall, scoring 36.0 to 24.9 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-2-1-vs-gpt-oss-120b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 5

## Summary

- They share 5 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 2.1 scores higher in 1 category and gpt-oss-120b in 3 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where gpt-oss-120b leads 50.6 to 9.6.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 1.9% for Claude 2.1 and 88.9% for gpt-oss-120b.
- gpt-oss-120b has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Noometry Index | 24.9 | 36.0 |
| Rank | 340 | 210 |
| Context | — | 131K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.037 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.17 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude 2.1: 25.8 (#322)
- gpt-oss-120b: 33.2 (#251)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 7.1% | 48.2% |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 26% |
| Aider Polyglot | — | 41.8% |
| SciCode | — | 36% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1380 |
| ALE-Bench | — | 575.62 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.41 |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 2.1: —
- gpt-oss-120b: 12.1 (#145)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | — | 18.7% |
| APEX-Agents | — | 4.4% |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 56.6% |
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | -21.53 |

## Reasoning

- Claude 2.1: 20.6 (#216)
- gpt-oss-120b: 19.5 (#236)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| DTBench | 51% | 76.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 119.22 | 139.94 |
| SimpleBench | — | 22.1% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 58.6% |
| CritPt | — | 1.1% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 20% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1364 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 2% |
| LMCA | — | 22.1% |
| Surface Evolver Bench | — | 25% |
| ForecastBench | 54.2 | — |

## Math

- Claude 2.1: 9.6 (#309)
- gpt-oss-120b: 50.6 (#43)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 1.9% | 88.9% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 68.8% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1388 |

## Knowledge

- Claude 2.1: 15.5 (#287)
- gpt-oss-120b: 42.3 (#89)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 33% | 75.8% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 79.5% |
| Confabulations | — | 15.7% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 14.2% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 68.4% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1356 |
| MMLU | 73.5% | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude 2.1: —
- gpt-oss-120b: 48.2 (#142)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1350 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1384 |
| LMArena French | — | 1370 |
| LMArena German | — | 1355 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1332 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1283 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1343 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1388 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 2.1: —
- gpt-oss-120b: 69.5 (#168)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | — | 83.6% |
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1318 |

## Long Context

- Claude 2.1: —
- gpt-oss-120b: 31.4 (#273)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| Fiction.LiveBench | — | 44.4% |
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1319 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 2.1: —
- gpt-oss-120b: 46.7 (#213)

| Benchmark | Claude 2.1 | gpt-oss-120b |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1366 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1274 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 77.1% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 961 |
| WildBench | — | 84.5% |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1340 |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 2.1 better than gpt-oss-120b?

gpt-oss-120b is the stronger model overall, scoring 36.0 to 24.9 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Claude 2.1 or gpt-oss-120b better for coding?

gpt-oss-120b scores higher on coding benchmarks: 33.2 versus 25.8 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 2.1 and gpt-oss-120b share?

5 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 2.1 has 7 scored results on Noometry and gpt-oss-120b has 48.