Head-to-head comparison across 4benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Opus 4.5
77
Claude Opus 4.8
93
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Opus 4.5 #12 · Claude Opus 4.8 #3
Pick Claude Opus 4.8 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Opus 4.5 only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Agentic
+17.6 difference
Coding
+10.5 difference
Knowledge
+3.9 difference
Multimodal
+6.1 difference
Claude Opus 4.5
Claude Opus 4.8
$5 / $25
$5 / $25
46 t/s
N/A
1.01s
N/A
200K
1M
Pick Claude Opus 4.8 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Opus 4.5 only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Claude Opus 4.8 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 93 to 77. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Opus 4.8's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 80.1 against 62.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HLE, 30.8% to 57.9%.
Claude Opus 4.8 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Opus 4.5 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 Opus 4.8 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for Claude Opus 4.5.
Claude Opus 4.8 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 93 to 77. The biggest single separator in this matchup is HLE, where the scores are 30.8% and 57.9%.
Claude Opus 4.8 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.1 versus 66.2. Inside this category, HLE is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Opus 4.8 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 76.4 versus 65.9. Inside this category, SWE-bench Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Opus 4.8 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 80.1 versus 62.5. Inside this category, GDPval-AA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Opus 4.8 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 76.1 versus 70. Inside this category, ScreenSpot Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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