Claude Opus 5.5 vs MiniMax-M3

At a glance

• Capability index

  • Claude Opus 5.5167.3
  • MiniMax-M3146.9

  Claude Opus 5.5 is 20.4 points higher.

• Price per 1M tokens

  • Claude Opus 5.5$8.00
  • MiniMax-M3$0.525

  MiniMax-M3 is 15 times cheaper.

• Context window

  • Claude Opus 5.51M tokens
  • MiniMax-M31M tokens

  They take in about the same.

• Released

  • Claude Opus 5.5Sep 22, 2026
  • MiniMax-M3Jun 1, 2026

  Claude Opus 5.5 is 4 months newer.

Where each scores higher

On the 17 tests both have taken, each on its own scale. A gap of a point or two can sit within a test’s margin of error.

5 more tests have results for only one of them; the table below lists every result.

Everything side by side

Comparison of Claude Opus 5.5 vs MiniMax-M3

Measure	Claude Opus 5.5Anthropic	MiniMax-M3MiniMax
Model
Maker	Anthropic	MiniMax
Sold here by	Anthropic	MiniMax (minimax.io)
API model ID	claude-opus-5-5	MiniMax-M3
Released	Sep 22, 2026	Jun 1, 2026
Knowledge cutoff	Jun 2026	Jan 2025
Weights	Closed: hosted access only	Open: downloadable
Developer’s country	United States	China
Hosts selling it	35including Anthropic directly	56including MiniMax directly
Test results
Capability index	167.3 (best of these models)#1 of 274	146.9#68 of 274
LiveBench overall	83.2% (best of these models)#2 of 66	67.3%#61 of 66
Arena text	1504 (best of these models)#4 of 413	1440#96 of 413
LiveBench coding	89.3% (best of these models)#2 of 66	68.2%#64 of 66
Arena WebDev	1815 (best of these models)#1 of 138	1482#58 of 138
Arena coding	1539 (best of these models)#12 of 408	1494#86 of 408
LiveBench mathematics	97.1% (best of these models)#1 of 66	77.0%#65 of 66
Mock AIME 2024–2025	100.0% (best of these models)#1 of 297	71.1%#133 of 297
FrontierMath Tiers 1–3	91.2%#3 of 114	Not tested
FrontierMath Tier 4	95.0%#6 of 70	Not tested
Arena math	1511 (best of these models)#8 of 396	1432#102 of 396
SimpleQA Verified	72.2%#4 of 86	Not tested
LiveBench agentic coding	71.7% (best of these models)#2 of 66	40.7%#60 of 66
CursorBench	57.8%#1 of 62	Not tested
LiveBench language	86.3% (best of these models)#10 of 66	76.8%#45 of 66
LiveBench instructions	67.0% (best of these models)#39 of 66	57.5%#61 of 66
Arena creative writing	1516 (best of these models)#2 of 411	1406#99 of 411
Arena instruction following	1517 (best of these models)#2 of 413	1434#88 of 413
LiveBench data analysis	80.3% (best of these models)#7 of 66	76.2%#34 of 66
LiveBench reasoning	92.2% (best of these models)#3 of 66	74.5%#61 of 66
GPQA Diamond	90.6%#40 of 319	90.9% (best of these models)#34 of 319
Arena hard prompts	1534 (best of these models)#2 of 413	1463#90 of 413
Chess puzzles	Not tested	14.0%#113 of 227
Price per million tokens
Input	$4.00	$0.30 (best of these models)
Output	$20.00	$1.20 (best of these models)
Blended, 3 input to 1 output	$8.00	$0.525 (best of these models)
Cached input	$0.20	$0.06 (best of these models)
Writing to the cache	$5.00	Not reported
Long requests	No separate price reported	$0.60 in, $2.40 outabove 512K tokens
The maker’s own price	This listing	This listing
Limits
Context window	1M tokens	1M tokens
Max input	1M tokens (best of these models)	512K tokens
Max output	128K tokens	512K tokens (best of these models)
Features
Reads	images, PDFs and text	images, text and video
Produces	text	text
Reasoning	Yeseffort low, medium, high, xhigh, max; can be switched off	Yeseffort low, medium, high; can be switched off; thinking budget can be set
Tool calling	Yes	Yes
Structured output	Yes, such as JSON	Yes, such as JSON
File attachments	Yes	Yes
Temperature setting	Fixed by the provider	Supported

Bold marks the better value in each row. Prices are each model’s own list price, or the middle price across hosts when the maker does not sell it, blended as three input tokens for every output token. Test results as published by LiveBench (Apache-2.0), Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0), Cursor CursorBench, compiled by Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0), Arena (CC BY 4.0); model details and prices from models.dev (MIT). Confirm pricing with the provider before use.