# Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

> Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 39.6 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 3.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.8's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-opus-4-8-vs-mistral-medium-3-5
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 22

## Summary

- They share 22 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in 9 categories and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 0 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.8 leads 64.6 to 16.6.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is NYT Connections (extended): 91.1% for Claude Opus 4.8 and 12.9% for Mistral Medium 3.5.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper at $1.50 / $7.50 per million input/output tokens, against $5 / $25 for Claude Opus 4.8.
- Claude Opus 4.8 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 262K.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 60.7 | 39.6 |
| Rank | 9 | 151 |
| Context | 1M | 262K |
| Input $/M | $5 | $1.50 |
| Output $/M | $25 | $7.50 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude Opus 4.8: 60.2 (#9)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 35.7 (#208)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1556 | 1263 |
| LMArena Coding | 1491 | 1461 |
| DeepSWE | 59% | — |
| FrontierCode | 46.5% | — |
| SciCode | 53.5% | — |
| GSO | 47.1% | — |
| WeirdML | 82.9% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 1,564 | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude Opus 4.8: 47.6 (#10)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: —

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| APEX-Agents | 48.9% | — |
| OSWorld 2.0 | 20.6% | — |
| Remote Labor Index | 8.3% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 39.7% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 50.2% | — |
| PostTrainBench | 33.8% | — |
| GBAEval | 70.9% | — |
| GDP.pdf | 24% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1204 | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 5,787 | — |

## Reasoning

- Claude Opus 4.8: 64.6 (#14)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 16.6 (#290)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 88.8% | 41.4% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 91.1% | 12.9% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1481 | 1436 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 158.3 | 141.42 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 72.1% | — |
| SimpleBench | 64.8% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 92.5% | — |
| CritPt | 20.9% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 34% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 23.5% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 28.6% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 36% | — |
| DTBench | 94.9% | — |
| LMCA | 57.5% | — |
| Surface Evolver Bench | 87.5% | — |
| Bench to the Future 3 | 0.14 | — |
| ForecastBench | 59.9 | — |

## Math

- Claude Opus 4.8: 78.2 (#11)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.4 (#113)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1487 | 1432 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 80% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 56.1% | — |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | 91.8% | — |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 98.3% | — |
| ProofBench | 69% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 47.2% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 31.3% | — |

## Knowledge

- Claude Opus 4.8: 61.3 (#26)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.3 (#123)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1501 | 1431 |
| GPQA Diamond | 91% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 53% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude Opus 4.8: 43.2 (#20)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 37.6 (#64)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1295 | 1222 |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 14.5% | — |
| Furniture Assembly | 42.5% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1475 | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude Opus 4.8: 55.4 (#31)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 52.1 (#93)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1450 | 1405 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1509 | 1443 |
| LMArena French | 1482 | 1448 |
| LMArena German | 1470 | 1453 |
| LMArena Korean | 1432 | 1387 |
| LMArena Russian | 1476 | 1396 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1470 | 1406 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1440 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Claude Opus 4.8: 77.6 (#22)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.7 (#87)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1476 | 1414 |

## Long Context

- Claude Opus 4.8: 45.4 (#37)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#101)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1482 | 1414 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude Opus 4.8: 72.1 (#17)
- Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.6 (#113)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1460 | 1421 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1453 | 1372 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1281 | 993 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1476 | 1423 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1840 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

Claude Opus 4.8 is the stronger model overall, scoring 60.7 to 39.6 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 3.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.8's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Medium 3.5?

Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper. It lists at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens; Claude Opus 4.8 lists at $5 and $25.

### Is Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 60.2 versus 35.7 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.8 does, with 1M tokens against 262K.

### How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?

22 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.8 has 65 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.