Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback) vs Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback) by Anthropic or Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) by Google? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-24.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 49.60
Total cost: $11161

GoogleGemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)On the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $14.7

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback) scores 40.7 points higher (49.6 vs 8.9) but costs 760× as much to run the benchmark ($11161 vs $14.7; flagship vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback) when you need intelligence above 8.9, and Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) when 8.9 is enough.

Metric	Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback)	Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	49.6	8.9	−82.1% Gemma 4 E4B (Reasonin… is 82.1% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$11,160.86	$14.68	−99.9% Gemma 4 E4B (Reasonin… is 99.9% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	71.92s	57.75s	−19.7% Gemma 4 E4B (Reasonin… is 19.7% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$10.0 / $50.0	$0.02 / $0.10
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Speech, Video

Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) vs Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback): 82.1% less intelligence, 99.9% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 19.7% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback): what beats it Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Max, Default Fallback) scores 57.60 for $8708.
Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.

Claude Fable 5 (Max, Opus 4.8 Fallback)Gemma 4 E4B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-fable-5/gemma-4-e4b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-fable-5/gemma-4-e4b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill