Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking vs Phi-4

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across knowledge, coding, math, and reasoning.

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking and Phi-4 finish on the same overall score, so this is less about a single winner and more about where the edge shows up. The headline says tie; the benchmark table is where the real choice happens.

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking is the reasoning model in the pair, while Phi-4 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 16K for Phi-4.

Quick Verdict

Treat this as a split decision. Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking makes more sense if you need the larger 200K context window or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile; Phi-4 is the better fit if coding is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Knowledge

Phi-4

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

34

Phi-4

70.5

38
MMLU
84.8
37
GPQA
56.1
35
SuperGPQA
-
33
OpenBookQA
-
53
MMLU-Pro
-
8
HLE
-

Coding

Phi-4

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

21.7

Phi-4

82.6

30
HumanEval
82.6
20
SWE-bench Verified
-
15
LiveCodeBench
-

Mathematics

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
38
AIME 2023
-
40
AIME 2024
-
39
AIME 2025
-
34
HMMT Feb 2023
-
36
HMMT Feb 2024
-
35
HMMT Feb 2025
-
37
BRUMO 2025
-
62
MATH-500
-

Reasoning

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
36
SimpleQA
-
34
MuSR
-
67
BBH
-

Instruction Following

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking
66
IFEval
-

Multilingual

Phi-4

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking

60

Phi-4

80.6

60
MGSM
80.6

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Phi-4?

Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking and Phi-4 are tied on overall score, so the right pick depends on which category matters most for your use case.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Phi-4?

Phi-4 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.5 versus 34. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Phi-4?

Phi-4 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 82.6 versus 21.7. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Claude 4.1 Opus Thinking or Phi-4?

Phi-4 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 80.6 versus 60. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 9, 2026

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