Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh) vs gpt-oss-20b (High)
Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh) by Anthropic or gpt-oss-20b (High) by OpenAI? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Trade-off
Verdict
Depends on your budget
Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh) scores 40.7 points higher (49.7 vs 9.0) but costs 204× as much to run the benchmark ($5868 vs $28.8; flagship vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh) when you need intelligence above 9.0, and gpt-oss-20b (High) when 9.0 is enough.
| Metric | Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh) | gpt-oss-20b (High) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 49.7 | 9.0 | −81.9% gpt-oss-20b (High) is 81.9% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $5,867.76 | $28.81 | −99.5% gpt-oss-20b (High) is 99.5% cheaper |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 37.50s | 15.12s | −59.7% gpt-oss-20b (High) is 59.7% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $5.00 / $25.0 | $0.05 / $0.22 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text |
gpt-oss-20b (High) vs Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh): 81.9% less intelligence, 99.5% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 59.7% faster end-to-end.
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
- gpt-oss-20b (High) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.
Claude Opus 5 (Xhigh)gpt-oss-20b (High)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-xhigh/gpt-oss-20b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-xhigh/gpt-oss-20b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill