Claude Sonnet 5 (Max) vs MiniMax-M3

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 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 Sonnet 5 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 38.20
Total cost: $6998

MiniMaxMiniMax-M3Off the frontier

Intelligence: 29.20
Total cost: $538

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5 (Max) scores 9.0 points higher (38.2 vs 29.2) but costs 13× as much to run the benchmark ($6998 vs $538; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5 (Max) when you need intelligence above 29.2, and MiniMax-M3 when 29.2 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5 (Max)	MiniMax-M3	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	38.2	29.2	−23.6% MiniMax-M3 is 23.6% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$6,998.25	$537.98	−92.3% MiniMax-M3 is 92.3% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	184.22s	25.47s	−86.2% MiniMax-M3 is 86.2% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.30 / $1.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Video

MiniMax-M3 vs Claude Sonnet 5 (Max): 23.6% less intelligence, 92.3% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 86.2% faster end-to-end.

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

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 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 Sonnet 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-sonnet-5/minimax-m3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5/minimax-m3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill