Claude Opus 4.8 vs MiniMax M2
Benchmarks, API pricing and specs, head to head. Data updated 2026-06-10.
Anthropic · May 2026
Anthropic's flagship Opus with adaptive thinking, effort controls and a 1M context — 88.6% on SWE-bench Verified at $5/$25.
MiniMax · Oct 2025
A 10B-active MoE tuned purely for agents and code — striking capability-per-active-parameter at rock-bottom prices.
The verdict
Claude Opus 4.8 wins 3 of the 3 benchmarks these models share, against 0 for MiniMax M2. On price the gap is dramatic: MiniMax M2 works out roughly 19x cheaper per blended million tokens. Claude Opus 4.8 also takes 1M of context versus 205K for MiniMax M2. And MiniMax M2 is open-weights (MIT), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
Benchmark head-to-head 3–0
Specs & pricing
| Claude Opus 4.8 | MiniMax M2 | |
|---|---|---|
| modhub Index | — | 68.9 |
| Input price / 1M | $5 | $0.3 |
| Output price / 1M | $25 | $1.2 |
| Context window | 1M | 205K |
| Max output | 64K | — |
| Open weights | no | yes (MIT) |
| Reasoning model | yes | yes |
| Multimodal input | text, image | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | Mar 2026 | Jun 2025 |
| Released | May 2026 | Oct 2025 |
| Example monthly cost* | $87.50 | $4.80 |
* 10M input + 1.5M output tokens per month at list prices, no caching. Green = better value on that row.
Frequently asked questions
- Which is better, Claude Opus 4.8 or MiniMax M2?
- Claude Opus 4.8 wins 3 of the 3 benchmarks these models share, against 0 for MiniMax M2. On price the gap is dramatic: MiniMax M2 works out roughly 19x cheaper per blended million tokens. Claude Opus 4.8 also takes 1M of context versus 205K for MiniMax M2. And MiniMax M2 is open-weights (MIT), so it can be self-hosted — a structural advantage if data control or vendor independence matters.
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or MiniMax M2?
- Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5/$25 per million input/output tokens, while MiniMax M2 costs $0.3/$1.2. For a typical workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month, that's $87.50 versus $4.80.
- Which model is better for coding, Claude Opus 4.8 or MiniMax M2?
- On SWE-bench Verified — the standard agentic-coding benchmark — Claude Opus 4.8 scores 88.6% versus 69.4% for MiniMax M2, making Claude Opus 4.8 the stronger pick for coding agents.