Claude Opus 5vsClaude Opus 4 20250514 Thinking 16k
Claude Opus 5 leads the overall Podium Score by 10.4 points (81.4 vs 71.0).Category wins: Claude Opus 5 0 — 0 Claude Opus 4 20250514 Thinking 16k.Claude Opus 4 20250514 Thinking 16k is the cheaper pick ($15/M vs $25/M per 1M output tokens). Claude Opus 5 is faster (60 t/s vs 50 t/s).
Key VerdictAggregated 2026 Benchmark Analysis
Claude Opus 5 is rated higher overall with a Podium Score of 81.4 (vs 71.0 for Claude Opus 4 20250514 Thinking 16k). Both models show closely matched capabilities across domain benchmarks.
Coding & Engineering
Comparable
Inference Speed
Claude Opus 5 (60 t/s)
Cost Efficiency
Claude Opus 4 20250514 Thinking 16k ($15/M/M)
| Metric | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Opus 4 20250514 Thinking 16k |
|---|---|---|
| Podium Score | 81.4 ▲ | 71.0 |
| Arena Elo | 1492 | — |
| Intelligence Index | 61.0 | — |
| Coding | 70.4 | — |
| Math | — | — |
| Reasoning | 82.3 | — |
| Agentic | — | — |
| Knowledge | 37.1 | — |
| Multimodal | — | — |
| Long-context | 99.2 | — |
| Output speed | 60 t/s ▲ | 50 t/s |
| Output price | $25/M | $15/M ▲ |
| Context window | 1000K ▲ | 128K |
Scores aggregated from five independent leaderboards. See Methodology. More head-to-heads: Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Mythos · Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Fable 5 · Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K3 · Claude Opus 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol