# Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 4.8 (2026): Benchmarks, Price & Verdict | Alher Tech

> Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Opus 4.8: head-to-head 2026 comparison across Arena Elo, MMLU, GPQA, HumanEval, context window and pricing. Verdict + use cases.

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|  | Claude Opus 5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| arenaElo |  | 1435 |
| humanEval |  | 94.5 |
| sweBench | 97 | 67 |
| mmlu |  | 93 |
| gpqa |  | 67.5 |
| aime |  | 90 |
| Price in/out ($/M) | $5 / $25 | $5 / $25 |

## Our verdict

Same $5 / $25 per M tokens, very different ceiling: Opus 5 doubles Opus 4.8 on Frontier-Bench v0.1 (43.3% vs 21.1%), reaches 97.0% on SWE-bench Verified per Vals AI, adds a 5-level effort selector (low to max, default high) and moves the knowledge cutoff to May 2026, the most recent in the lineup. Anthropic now ships it as the default model in Claude Max and Pro, Opus 4.8 moves to legacy and Opus 4.1 retires on August 5, 2026. Existing Opus 4.8 workloads get a drop-in generational upgrade: there is no reason to start a new project on 4.8.

[Claude Opus 5](https://alhertech.com/en/ai-comparison/claude-opus-5/) · [Claude Opus 4.8](https://alhertech.com/en/ai-comparison/claude-opus-4-8/) · [All AI model comparisons](https://alhertech.com/en/ai-comparison/)