Claude Opus 5vsClaude Opus 4.8

Claude Opus 5 leads the overall Podium Score by 5.4 points (81.4 vs 76.0).Category wins: Claude Opus 5 2 — 1 Claude Opus 4.8.Claude Opus 4.8 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).

MetricClaude Opus 5Claude Opus 4.8
Podium Score81.4 ▲76.0
Arena Elo1492 ▲1484
Intelligence Index61.0 ▲55.7
Coding70.4 ▲58.0
Math58.7
Reasoning82.382.8 ▲
Agentic74.9
Knowledge37.1 ▲28.8
Multimodal89.6
Long-context99.299.2
Output speed60 t/s ▲50 t/s
Output price$25/M$15/M ▲
Context window1000K1000K
Scores aggregated from five leaderboards on 2026-08-05. See Methodology. More head-to-heads: Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Mythos Preview · Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Fable 5 · Claude Opus 5 vs Kimi K3 · Claude Opus 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol