Claude Opus 5 (Max) vs MiniMax-M3

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5 (Max) by Anthropic or MiniMax-M3 by MiniMax? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 5 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 50.80
Total cost: $7275

MiniMaxMiniMax-M3Off the frontier

Intelligence: 29.20
Total cost: $538

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 5 (Max) scores 21.6 points higher (50.8 vs 29.2) but costs 14× as much to run the benchmark ($7275 vs $538; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 5 (Max) when you need intelligence above 29.2, and MiniMax-M3 when 29.2 is enough.

Metric	Claude Opus 5 (Max)	MiniMax-M3	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	50.8	29.2	−42.5% MiniMax-M3 is 42.5% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$7,274.74	$537.98	−92.6% MiniMax-M3 is 92.6% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	59.61s	25.47s	−57.3% MiniMax-M3 is 57.3% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$5.00 / $25.0	$0.30 / $1.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Video

MiniMax-M3 vs Claude Opus 5 (Max): 42.5% less intelligence, 92.6% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 57.3% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5 (Max): what beats it MiniMax-M3: what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
MiniMax-M3 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.

Claude Opus 5 (Max)MiniMax-M3Today'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-opus-5/minimax-m3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5/minimax-m3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill