Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Large
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Opus 4.8 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (88 vs 65 on our capability index).
- •Mistral Large is 60% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •Claude Opus 4.8 has a 1M context window vs 128000 - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Large | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 128000 |
| Input / 1M tokens | $5.00 | ✓2.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $25.00 | 6.00 |
| Release date | 2026-05 | 2024-02 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 88.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 69.2% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 74.6% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | 93.6% | - |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index | 61.4 | - |
| MMLU | - | 84.0% |
| HumanEval | - | 92.0% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if...
- →You need top-tier autonomous coding and multi-step agentic reliability
- →You run long-horizon agent traces that previously derailed after compaction
- →You want enterprise-grade reasoning with 1M context and 128k output
- →You need throughput and are willing to pay fast-mode premium for 2.5x speed
Choose Mistral Large if...
- →You need a strong European-built flagship with open weights
- →Your work is multilingual or requires nuanced reasoning
- →You want structured/JSON output and solid coding ability
- →You need the option to self-host for data sovereignty