Head-to-head comparison across 2benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Opus 4.5
80
Gemma 4 26B A4B
58
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Opus 4.5 #5 · Gemma 4 26B A4B unranked
Pick Claude Opus 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 26B A4B only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you need the larger 256K context window.
Knowledge
+17.0 difference
Multimodal
+3.2 difference
Claude Opus 4.5
Gemma 4 26B A4B
$null / $null
$0 / $0
46 t/s
N/A
1.01s
N/A
200K
256K
Pick Claude Opus 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 26B A4B only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you need the larger 256K context window.
Claude Opus 4.5 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 80 to 58. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Opus 4.5's sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 66.2 against 49.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HLE, 30.8% to 17.2%. Gemma 4 26B A4B does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Gemma 4 26B A4B 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. Gemma 4 26B A4B gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude Opus 4.5.
Claude Opus 4.5 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 80 to 58. The biggest single separator in this matchup is HLE, where the scores are 30.8% and 17.2%.
Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 66.2 versus 49.2. Inside this category, HLE is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 4 26B A4B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 73.8 versus 70.6. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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