Claude Opus 4.6 vs Llama 4 Maverick
Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic, released Feb 2026) and Llama 4 Maverick (Meta, released Apr 2025) sit at opposite ends of the price-performance curve. Opus 4.6 is a 1M-context reasoning model built for agentic coding; Maverick is a 128-expert MoE model priced for scale. Both run on OpenKey under one key with a flat 3% fee on provider list price. The gap that matters: benchmarks favor Opus 4.6 heavily, price favors Maverick by a wide margin.
Spec vs spec
| Spec | Claude Opus 4.6 | Llama 4 Maverick |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 1M | 1.0M |
| Max output | 128K | 16K |
| Input modalities | text, image, file | text, image |
| Output modalities | text | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | — | Aug 31, 2024 |
| Released | Feb 4, 2026 | Apr 5, 2025 |
| Reasoning | optional | — |
Pricing
Per 1M tokens. Provider price plus the flat 3% fee — the sum is what you pay.
anthropic/claude-opus-4.6
Input · 1M tokens
$5.00 + 3%$5.15
Output · 1M tokens
$25.00 + 3%$25.75
Cache read · 1M tokens
$0.500 + 3%$0.515
Cache write · 1M tokens
$6.25 + 3%$6.44
FEE — FLAT, EVERY MODEL3%
meta-llama/llama-4-maverick
Input · 1M tokens
$0.150 + 3%$0.154
Output · 1M tokens
$0.600 + 3%$0.618
FEE — FLAT, EVERY MODEL3%
One workload, priced on both
10M input + 2M output tokens at each model's price, flat 3% fee included.
anthropic/claude-opus-4.6
$103.00
$100.00 provider + 3%
meta-llama/llama-4-maverickCheaper
$2.78
$2.70 provider + 3%
Benchmarks
Design Arena categories where both models have results. Higher Elo and lower rank win.
| Claude Opus 4.6 | Llama 4 Maverick | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Elo | Rank | Elo | Rank |
| 3D | 1351 | #4 | 976 | #91 |
| Code | 1342 | #3 | 929 | #102 |
| Data viz | 1322 | #5 | 926 | #100 |
| Game dev | 1344 | #4 | 903 | #103 |
| UI components | 1350 | #3 | 955 | #94 |
| Websites | 1338 | #3 | 914 | #105 |
Head-to-head preference voting. How we filter and rank
Pricing math
Provider list price for Claude Opus 4.6 is $5.00/M input, $25.00/M output. On OpenKey that's $5.15/M input and $25.75/M output ($5.00 × 1.03, $25.00 × 1.03). Llama 4 Maverick lists at $0.15/M input, $0.60/M output — OpenKey price is $0.1545/M input and $0.618/M output.
Run the numbers on a 10M-input / 2M-output workload: Opus 4.6 costs $100.00, Maverick costs $2.70. That's roughly a 37x gap on this workload, and the input price ratio alone is 33.33x. Opus 4.6 also charges for cache reads ($0.50/M) and cache writes ($6.25/M) — Maverick has no cache pricing listed, so repeated-context workloads don't get a discount lever there. If your job is high-volume and tolerant of lower output quality, Maverick's cost advantage is decisive.
Coding and agent benchmarks
Design Arena tells a clean story. Opus 4.6 ranks #3–#11 across every category tested: #3 in mobileapps, #3 in uicomponent, #3 in website, #3 in codecategories, #4 in fullstack/webapps/gamedev/svg, #6 in asciiart, #11 in androidnative — all with win rates between 60.5% and 68.8%.
Maverick's best Design Arena rank is #91 (3d category, 40.2% win rate); its worst is #105 (website, 34.4% win rate). Artificial Analysis scores put Maverick's coding index at 16.3 and agentic index at just 1.3, which lines up with the low Design Arena agent-category presence — Maverick has no agent-arena scores listed at all, only model-arena ones. For agentic coding work, Opus 4.6 isn't close.
Context and output limits
Context length is a near-wash: Opus 4.6 offers 1,000,000 tokens, Maverick offers 1,048,576 tokens — a context ratio of 0.95, meaning Maverick actually has slightly more room. Where they diverge is max output: Opus 4.6 can generate up to 128,000 tokens in a single completion versus Maverick's 16,384. For tasks that require long generated output — large refactors, full documents, multi-file code dumps — Opus 4.6's ceiling is 8x higher, even though both models can ingest similarly huge inputs.
Modality and parameters
Opus 4.6 accepts text, image, and file inputs and supports reasoning effort levels (low/medium/high/max, defaulting to medium) plus verbosity control — useful for tuning cost vs. depth on a per-call basis. Maverick accepts text and image only, with no reasoning parameter, but supports a wider set of sampling controls (logit_bias, min_p, top_logprobs, repetition_penalty) that Opus 4.6 doesn't expose. If your pipeline needs file uploads or reasoning-effort tuning, Opus 4.6 is the only option here; if you need fine-grained sampling control for classic text-completion tuning, Maverick's parameter set is broader.
When to pick each
Opus 4.6: agentic coding, full-stack app generation, anything where Design Arena's #3-#11 rankings and 60%+ win rates translate to fewer retries and less human cleanup. The knowledge cutoff isn't listed for Opus 4.6, but its Feb 2026 release date puts it well ahead of Maverick's Aug 2024 cutoff for anything requiring recent knowledge.
Maverick: bulk text processing, tasks where a 34-40% win rate against top models is acceptable, or budget-constrained pipelines where the $2.70 vs $100.00 cost delta on a 10M/2M workload matters more than winning every head-to-head.
Which model for which job
| Use case | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Agentic full-stack app generation | Claude Opus 4.6 | Ranks #4 in fullstack Design Arena category with 68.6% win rate; Maverick has no agent-arena score |
| High-volume text classification/extraction | Llama 4 Maverick | $2.70 vs $100.00 for a 10M-input/2M-output workload |
| Long generated output (large refactors, full docs) | Claude Opus 4.6 | 128,000 max output tokens vs Maverick's 16,384 |
| File-based input workflows | Claude Opus 4.6 | Only Opus 4.6 supports file input modality |
| UI component generation | Claude Opus 4.6 | Ranks #3 in uicomponent category vs Maverick's #94 |
| Cost-sensitive prototyping at scale | Llama 4 Maverick | Input price is 33.33x cheaper than Opus 4.6 |
Questions
- How much more does Claude Opus 4.6 cost than Llama 4 Maverick?
- On OpenKey, Opus 4.6 runs $5.15/M input tokens vs Maverick's $0.1545/M — a 33.33x input price ratio. On a 10M-input/2M-output workload, that's $100.00 for Opus 4.6 versus $2.70 for Maverick.
- Which model has more context?
- Maverick technically has slightly more: 1,048,576 tokens vs Opus 4.6's 1,000,000, a context ratio of 0.95. In practice both handle context similarly at this scale; the real difference is max output — 128,000 tokens for Opus 4.6 vs 16,384 for Maverick.
- Is Claude Opus 4.6 actually better at coding?
- Yes, by a wide margin on Design Arena. Opus 4.6 ranks #3 in codecategories with a 63.9% win rate; Maverick ranks #102 in the same category with 35.8%. Maverick's Artificial Analysis coding index is 16.3 versus its agentic index of just 1.3.
- Can I use both models through one API key?
- Yes — both Claude Opus 4.6 and Llama 4 Maverick are available on OpenKey with a single key, and pricing is provider list price plus a flat 3% fee (e.g., Opus 4.6's $5.00/M input becomes $5.15/M on OpenKey).