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Claude Opus 4.6 vs Gemma 3 12B

Side-by-side API pricing and Artificial Analysis performance for Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic) and Gemma 3 12B (Google). Green cells mark the better value in each row.

Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC · refreshed hourly

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

Gemma 3 12B

Google

Pricing
Input $/1M$5.00$0.05
Output $/1M$25.00$0.15
Blended $/1M (3:1)$10.00$0.075
RAG example (30K in / 2K out)$0.2$0.0018
Quality & speed
Intelligence Index37.85.5
Coding Index5.8
Agentic Index0.3
Output speed (tok/s)570
Time to first token1.85s0s
Specs
Context window1M131K
Input modalitiestext, image, filetext, image

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Gemma 3 12B?

Gemma 3 12B has the lower blended API price at $0.075 per 1M tokens (3:1 input:output mix), versus $10.00 for the other model. Prices are live from OpenRouter and refresh about hourly.

Which is better for RAG workloads?

For a typical RAG request (30K input / 2K output tokens), Gemma 3 12B costs about $0.0018 per request versus $0.2. Also compare context windows: Claude Opus 4.6 offers 1M and Gemma 3 12B offers 131K.

Which scores higher on Artificial Analysis benchmarks?

Claude Opus 4.6 leads on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (37.8 vs 5.5). Check coding and agentic indices on this page for workload-specific tradeoffs.