Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Opus 4.6
87
Gemma 4 12B
53
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Opus 4.6 #7 · Gemma 4 12B unranked
Pick Claude Opus 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 12B only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.
Coding
+7.6 difference
Knowledge
+1.6 difference
Multimodal
+8.2 difference
Claude Opus 4.6
Gemma 4 12B
$5 / $25
N/A
40 t/s
N/A
1.78s
N/A
1M
256K
Pick Claude Opus 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 12B only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the stronger reasoning-first profile.
Claude Opus 4.6 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 87 to 53. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Opus 4.6's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 77.3 against 69.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 91.3% to 78.8%. Gemma 4 12B does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Gemma 4 12B is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Opus 4.6 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 4.6 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 256K for Gemma 4 12B.
Claude Opus 4.6 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 87 to 53. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 91.3% and 78.8%.
Gemma 4 12B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 77.8 versus 76.2. Inside this category, HLE w/o tools is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 4 12B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 72 versus 64.4. Claude Opus 4.6 stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
Claude Opus 4.6 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 77.3 versus 69.1. Inside this category, MedXpertQA (MM) is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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