Claude Opus 4.6 vs Phi-4

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across knowledge, coding, math, and reasoning.

Claude Opus 4.6 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 90 to 39. 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 multilingual, where it averages 96 against 80.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is GPQA, 97 to 56.1. Phi-4 does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Claude Opus 4.6 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $15.00 input / $75.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.00 input / $0.00 output per 1M tokens for Phi-4. That is roughly Infinityx on output cost alone. Claude Opus 4.6 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 16K for Phi-4.

Quick Verdict

Pick Claude Opus 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Phi-4 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.

Knowledge

Claude Opus 4.6

Claude Opus 4.6

85.7

Phi-4

70.5

99
MMLU
84.8
97
GPQA
56.1
95
SuperGPQA
-
93
OpenBookQA
-
92
MMLU-Pro
-
38
HLE
-

Coding

Phi-4

Claude Opus 4.6

82

Phi-4

82.6

91
HumanEval
82.6
80
SWE-bench Verified
-
75
LiveCodeBench
-

Mathematics

Claude Opus 4.6
99
AIME 2023
-
99
AIME 2024
-
98
AIME 2025
-
95
HMMT Feb 2023
-
97
HMMT Feb 2024
-
96
HMMT Feb 2025
-
96
BRUMO 2025
-
98
MATH-500
-

Reasoning

Claude Opus 4.6
95
SimpleQA
-
93
MuSR
-
94
BBH
-

Instruction Following

Claude Opus 4.6
95
IFEval
-

Multilingual

Claude Opus 4.6

Claude Opus 4.6

96

Phi-4

80.6

96
MGSM
80.6

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Claude Opus 4.6 or Phi-4?

Claude Opus 4.6 is ahead overall, 90 to 39. The biggest single separator in this matchup is GPQA, where the scores are 97 and 56.1.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude Opus 4.6 or Phi-4?

Claude Opus 4.6 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 85.7 versus 70.5. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude Opus 4.6 or Phi-4?

Phi-4 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 82.6 versus 82. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Claude Opus 4.6 or Phi-4?

Claude Opus 4.6 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 96 versus 80.6. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 9, 2026

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