Claude Opus 4.8 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max): pricing, Quality, Value, and benchmarks

Buyer access

Pricing, app access, and Conversation Value

• Humanity's Last Exam

  Normalized quality input

  49.8%

  Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 release page | Vendor-reported Anthropic Opus 4.8 HLE no-tools score. Do not replace with tools-enabled or adaptive-effort HLE variants.

• SWE-Bench Pro

  Software engineering task resolution

  69.2%

  Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 release page | Vendor-reported Anthropic Opus 4.8 SWE-Bench Pro score. Do not substitute SWE-Bench Verified.

• Humanity's Last Exam

  Normalized quality input

  33.5%

  Artificial Analysis - Humanity's Last Exam evaluation | Third-party benchmark evaluation page used only after the official HLE leaderboard sources fail to yield a usable result.

• SWE-Bench Pro

  Software engineering task resolution

  55.4%

  BenchLM AI coding leaderboard | Third-party coding leaderboard with exact model rows for SWE-Bench Pro and companion coding benchmarks.

• GPQA Diamond

  Pass@1

  90.1%

  NVIDIA DeepSeek V4 Pro model card | NVIDIA-hosted model card row for DeepSeek V4 Pro Max; use as sourced provisional benchmark evidence. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row.

• Terminal-Bench 2.0

  Agentic terminal task completion

  67.9%

  NVIDIA DeepSeek V4 Pro model card | NVIDIA-hosted model card row for DeepSeek V4 Pro Max; display as companion agentic coding evidence. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row.

Claude Opus 4.8 is Anthropic's newest Opus model, strongest for coding, agentic tasks, and complex professional work where the vendor-reported benchmark evidence applies.

Claude Opus 4.8 is under active editorial review. Current public ranking data is limited to accepted source/fact evidence for benchmarks, pricing, and context rather than AI-generated score changes.

A cost-efficient frontier challenger for buyers who want strong reasoning, long-context work, and coding evidence without paying Western flagship economics.

Released April 2026, DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) is a serious cost-efficiency challenger for buyers who care about frontier intelligence without frontier infrastructure costs. It competes with leading Western frontier models on complex reasoning, document analysis, and sustained multi-step work, while appearing to require far fewer processing resources for the level of capability delivered. Its strengths are broad versatility: long-context work that stays coherent, useful creative writing, strong coding benchmark evidence, and interactions that feel more thoughtful than formulaic. The caveats are still real: Western models may retain an edge on some narrow coding benchmarks, deeper web-search integration, and enterprise ecosystem maturity, and the low unit cost can encourage enough usage that teams should still watch total volume. Bottom line: DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) is frontier-level capability at unusually aggressive economics. If you want one of the smartest models your money can buy, it belongs high on the shortlist.