Model comparison

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Mistral Medium 3.5

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 40.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 3.3× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Opus 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.

Last verified . 22 shared benchmarks.

Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic

58.2

Rank #20 Confirmed

Mistral Medium 3.5 Mistral AI

40.2

Rank #152 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 22 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher in 8 categories and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 1 category; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 57.8 to 17.3.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is NYT Connections (extended): 92.1% for Claude Opus 4.6 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 4.6.
  • Claude Opus 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 262K.
  • Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

Side by side

Claude Opus 4.6 and Mistral Medium 3.5 specifications
Claude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
ProviderAnthropicMistral AI
Noometry Index58.240.2
Released2026-02-04—
WeightsProprietaryOpen
Context window1M262K
Max output128K210K
Input $ / M tokens$5$1.50
Output $ / M tokens$25$7.50
Results tracked6822

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Category by category

Coding Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20), Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.0 (#213)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena WebDev15471264
LMArena Coding15361461
SWE-bench Verified78.7%—
FrontierCode26.6%—
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)75.6%—
SWE-bench Multilingual72%—
GSO41.2%—
WeirdML78%—
ALE-Bench996.5—
AlgoTune1.47—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4), Mistral Medium 3.5: —

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
Terminal-Bench79.8%—
APEX-Agents46.3%—
Remote Labor Index4.2%—
τ²-bench Banking27.3%—
Cybench93%—
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), Mistral Medium 3.5: 17.3 (#295)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
Kagi LLM Benchmark83.6%41.4%
NYT Connections (extended)92.1%12.9%
LMArena Hard Prompts15271436
Epoch Capabilities Index155.24141.35
ARC-AGI-269.2%—
SimpleBench67.6%—
ARC-AGI-194%—
Chess Puzzles17%—
EnigmaEval7.6%—
Thematic Generalization80.6%—
EBR-Bench12.7%—
Mystery Game Puzzles25%—
DTBench91.2%—
LMCA55.8%—
ForecastBench60—

Math Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31), Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.1 (#113)

Math benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Math15191431
FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3)66%—
FrontierMath Tier 426.8%—
MathArena Final-Answer Competitions78.5%—
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202594.4%—
ProofBench50%—
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)40.7%—
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)22.9%—

Knowledge Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26), Mistral Medium 3.5: 40.0 (#126)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Expert15461432
GPQA Diamond90.5%—
Humanity's Last Exam34.4%—
SimpleQA Verified47%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate12.2%—

Multimodal Mistral Medium 3.5 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74), Mistral Medium 3.5: 38.3 (#65)

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Vision13161223
Furniture Assembly28.3%—
LMArena Document1507—

Multilingual Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6), Mistral Medium 3.5: 51.9 (#100)

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Non-English14891404
LMArena Chinese15511442
LMArena French15131448
LMArena German15021451
LMArena Korean14641385
LMArena Russian14971395
LMArena Spanish15101409
LMArena Japanese1484—

Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4), Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.6 (#90)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Instruction Following15231415

Long Context Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13), Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#103)

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Longer Query15201415
CL-bench20.7%—
CL-bench Life17%—

Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10), Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.5 (#117)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude Opus 4.6Mistral Medium 3.5
LMArena Text15031421
LMArena Creative Writing15051374
EQ-Bench 41223993
LMArena Multi-Turn15131423
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1809—

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 40.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 3.3× 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 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 4.6 lists at $5 and $25.

Is Claude Opus 4.6 or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.2 versus 36.0 in the Noometry coding category.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Opus 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 262K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Opus 4.6 and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?

22 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Opus 4.6 has 68 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.

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