Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
GPT-5.2 Instant is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 85 to 64. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
GPT-5.2 Instant's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 75.5 against 44. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 74 to 40.
GPT-5.2 Instant is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4.1 Opus 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 gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for GPT-5.2 Instant.
Pick GPT-5.2 Instant if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4.1 Opus only becomes the better choice if you need the larger 200K context window or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.6
Claude 4.1 Opus
58.7
GPT-5.2 Instant
75.5
Claude 4.1 Opus
44
GPT-5.2 Instant
93.1
Claude 4.1 Opus
80.7
GPT-5.2 Instant
90.9
Claude 4.1 Opus
72.9
GPT-5.2 Instant
79.8
Claude 4.1 Opus
57.6
GPT-5.2 Instant
95
Claude 4.1 Opus
83
GPT-5.2 Instant
94.4
Claude 4.1 Opus
81.8
GPT-5.2 Instant
97.2
Claude 4.1 Opus
77.7
GPT-5.2 Instant is ahead overall, 85 to 64. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 74 and 40.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.8 versus 57.6. Inside this category, HLE is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 75.5 versus 44. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 97.2 versus 77.7. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 90.9 versus 72.9. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.6 versus 58.7. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 93.1 versus 80.7. Inside this category, OfficeQA Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 95 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
GPT-5.2 Instant has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 94.4 versus 81.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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