AiCostCompare

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

Side-by-side API pricing and Artificial Analysis performance for Claude Opus 4.6 (Anthropic) and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Meta). Green cells mark the better value in each row.

Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 2:46 AM UTC · refreshed hourly

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

Meta

Pricing
Input $/1M$5.00$0.05
Output $/1M$25.00$0.08
Blended $/1M (3:1)$10.00$0.057
RAG example (30K in / 2K out)$0.2$0.00166
Quality & speed
Intelligence Index37.87.6
Coding Index5.4
Agentic Index0.5
Output speed (tok/s)57
Time to first token1.85s
Specs
Context window1M131K
Input modalitiestext, image, filetext

FAQ

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Llama 3.1 8B Instruct?

Llama 3.1 8B Instruct has the lower blended API price at $0.057 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), Llama 3.1 8B Instruct costs about $0.00166 per request versus $0.2. Also compare context windows: Claude Opus 4.6 offers 1M and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct offers 131K.

Which scores higher on Artificial Analysis benchmarks?

Claude Opus 4.6 leads on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (37.8 vs 7.6). Check coding and agentic indices on this page for workload-specific tradeoffs.