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.
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 | Mistral Medium 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 58.2 | 40.2 |
| Released | 2026-02-04 | — |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 1M | 262K |
| Max output | 128K | 210K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $5 | $1.50 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $25 | $7.50 |
| Results tracked | 68 | 22 |
Sponsored placements are available on pages like this one. Advertise on Noometry
Category by category
Coding Claude Opus 4.6 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20), Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.0 (#213)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1547 | 1264 |
| LMArena Coding | 1536 | 1461 |
| SWE-bench Verified | 78.7% | — |
| FrontierCode | 26.6% | — |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 75.6% | — |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 72% | — |
| GSO | 41.2% | — |
| WeirdML | 78% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 996.5 | — |
| AlgoTune | 1.47 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4), Mistral Medium 3.5: —
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 79.8% | — |
| APEX-Agents | 46.3% | — |
| Remote Labor Index | 4.2% | — |
| τ²-bench Banking | 27.3% | — |
| Cybench | 93% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 55.3% | — |
| GBAEval | 44.1% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1253 | — |
| METR Time Horizons | 78.9% | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 8,018 | — |
Reasoning Claude Opus 4.6 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 57.8 (#23), Mistral Medium 3.5: 17.3 (#295)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 83.6% | 41.4% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | 92.1% | 12.9% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1527 | 1436 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 155.24 | 141.35 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 69.2% | — |
| SimpleBench | 67.6% | — |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 94% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 17% | — |
| EnigmaEval | 7.6% | — |
| Thematic Generalization | 80.6% | — |
| EBR-Bench | 12.7% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 25% | — |
| DTBench | 91.2% | — |
| LMCA | 55.8% | — |
| ForecastBench | 60 | — |
Math Claude Opus 4.6 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31), Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.1 (#113)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1519 | 1431 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | 66% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | 26.8% | — |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | 78.5% | — |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 94.4% | — |
| ProofBench | 50% | — |
| 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)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1546 | 1432 |
| GPQA Diamond | 90.5% | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 34.4% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 47% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 12.2% | — |
Multimodal Mistral Medium 3.5 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74), Mistral Medium 3.5: 38.3 (#65)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1316 | 1223 |
| Furniture Assembly | 28.3% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1507 | — |
Multilingual Claude Opus 4.6 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6), Mistral Medium 3.5: 51.9 (#100)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1489 | 1404 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1551 | 1442 |
| LMArena French | 1513 | 1448 |
| LMArena German | 1502 | 1451 |
| LMArena Korean | 1464 | 1385 |
| LMArena Russian | 1497 | 1395 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1510 | 1409 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1484 | — |
Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.6 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4), Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.6 (#90)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1523 | 1415 |
Long Context Claude Opus 4.6 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13), Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#103)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1520 | 1415 |
| CL-bench | 20.7% | — |
| CL-bench Life | 17% | — |
Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.6 leads
Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10), Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.5 (#117)
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1503 | 1421 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1505 | 1374 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1223 | 993 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1513 | 1423 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1809 | — |
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.