Head-to-head comparison across 4benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Opus 4.5
76
MAI-Thinking-1
65
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Opus 4.5 #14 · MAI-Thinking-1 #23
Pick Claude Opus 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. MAI-Thinking-1 only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you need the larger 256K context window.
Agentic
+16.5 difference
Coding
+5.1 difference
Knowledge
+3.7 difference
Inst. Following
+5.6 difference
Claude Opus 4.5
MAI-Thinking-1
$5 / $25
N/A
46 t/s
N/A
1.01s
N/A
200K
256K
Pick Claude Opus 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. MAI-Thinking-1 only becomes the better choice if instruction following is the priority or you need the larger 256K context window.
Claude Opus 4.5 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 76 to 65. 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 agentic, where it averages 62.5 against 46. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is IFBench, 58% to 85%. MAI-Thinking-1 does hit back in instruction following, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
MAI-Thinking-1 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. MAI-Thinking-1 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, 76 to 65. The biggest single separator in this matchup is IFBench, where the scores are 58% and 85%.
MAI-Thinking-1 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 69.9 versus 66.2. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
MAI-Thinking-1 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 71 versus 65.9. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62.5 versus 46. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
MAI-Thinking-1 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 85 versus 79.4. Inside this category, IFBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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