// head_to_head
Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Opus 4.6
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Claude Opus 4.6 is the better model, at roughly the same price.
Claude Opus 4.6 leads by 1.9 points overall and the two list within about 10% of each other, so the cheaper-but-weaker trade-off does not apply. Price parity plus a score gap usually makes this an easy call. Claude Opus 4.6 also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.2101 per point.
anthropic
Claude Opus 4.5
- Blended / 1M
- $10.00
- Context
- 200K
- Released
- Nov 24, 2025
- Overall score
- 72.6
anthropic
Claude Opus 4.6
- Blended / 1M
- $10.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Feb 4, 2026
- Overall score
- 74.5
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 72.6 | 74.5win |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.3211 | $0.2101win |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $10.00 | $10.00 |
| Input price / 1M | $5.00 | $5.00 |
| Output price / 1M | $25.00 | $25.00 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.500 | $0.500 |
| Context window | 200K | 1Mwin |
| Max output tokens | 64K | 128Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Opus 4.5 on top, Claude Opus 4.6 below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $2876.00/mo | $2876.00/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $3700.00/mo | $3700.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $3480.00/mo | $3480.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $6650.00/mo | $6650.00/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $12,750/mo | $12,750/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Claude Opus 4.6
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.2101 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Claude Opus 4.6
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 74.5.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Claude Opus 4.6
Leads on agentic coding — 49.0 against 39.7.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Claude Opus 4.6
Wider context window — 1M against 200K.
Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Opus 4.6 FAQ
Which is better, Claude Opus 4.5 or Claude Opus 4.6?
Claude Opus 4.6 is the better model, at roughly the same price. Claude Opus 4.6 leads by 1.9 points overall and the two list within about 10% of each other, so the cheaper-but-weaker trade-off does not apply. Price parity plus a score gap usually makes this an easy call. Claude Opus 4.6 also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.2101 per point.
Is Claude Opus 4.5 cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6?
They cost about the same. Both land near $10.00 per million tokens on a 3:1 input:output blend, so price is unlikely to be the deciding factor between them.
Claude Opus 4.5 vs Claude Opus 4.6: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Opus 4.5 scores 72.6 and Claude Opus 4.6 scores 74.5 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 1.9-point lead for Claude Opus 4.6. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Claude Opus 4.5 or Claude Opus 4.6?
Claude Opus 4.6. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Claude Opus 4.5 works out at $0.3211 per point and Claude Opus 4.6 at $0.2101.
Does Claude Opus 4.5 or Claude Opus 4.6 have a bigger context window?
Claude Opus 4.6 has the larger context window: 200K for Claude Opus 4.5 against 1M for Claude Opus 4.6. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Opus 4.6 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.500 per million for Claude Opus 4.5 and $0.500 for Claude Opus 4.6, against full input rates of $5.00 and $5.00. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.