Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) is the pick when you need reasoning / thinking mode, Pareto 26.9 when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) | Pareto 26.9 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Unbiased |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $2.50 | $2.50 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $12.50 | $7.50 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $5.00 | $3.75 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 10% | 17% |
| Context window | 200K tokens (~300 pages) | 262K tokens (~393 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 38% | 48% |
| Max output per response | 64K tokens (~48,000 words) | 131K tokens (~98,300 words) |
| Input types | file, image, text | text, image |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2025-11-24 | 2026-10-13 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) | Pareto 26.9 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $438 | $338 | Pareto 26.9 saves $100 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $425 | $375 | Pareto 26.9 saves $50.00 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $450 | $390 | Pareto 26.9 saves $60.00 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $275 | $245 | Pareto 26.9 saves $30.00 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $138 | $133 | Pareto 26.9 saves $5.00 |
| Capability | Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) | Pareto 26.9 | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | — | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | ✓ Yes | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | ✓ Yes | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | — | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | — | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) is the pick when you need reasoning / thinking mode, Pareto 26.9 when cost matters at scale. In short: Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) when you need reasoning / thinking mode, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search; Pareto 26.9 when cost matters at scale, you generate long outputs in one go, you want the newer model.
Pareto 26.9 is cheaper: $3.75 vs $5.00 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 25% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $338 against $438.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) costs $2.50 per 1M input tokens and $12.50 per 1M output tokens; Pareto 26.9 costs $2.50 input and $7.50 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Pareto 26.9: 262K tokens, about 393 pages, against 200K (about 300 pages) for Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch).
Tool calling — Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch): yes, Pareto 26.9: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch): yes, Pareto 26.9: yes.
Yes, both accept image input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) can write up to 64K tokens (about 48,000 words) per response; Pareto 26.9 up to 131K (about 98,300 words).
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) was listed on 2025-11-24; Pareto 26.9 on 2026-10-13.
Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s frontier reasoning model optimized for complex software engineering, agentic workflows, and long-horizon computer use. It offers strong multimodal capabilities, competitive performance across real-world coding and...
Full Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.5 (batch) specs →Pareto is a multimodal composite model built for research, coding, and agentic workflows, while delivering frontier-level performance across a broad range of general-purpose tasks.
Full Pareto 26.9 specs →