Gemini 4 Carbon vs Claude Opus 5.5

Google’s Carbon model card puts Carbon ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 on 14 of the 16 benchmarks where both have a score; Opus 5.5 leads on FrontierSWE 2 and OSWorld-2.1. Opus 5.5 lists at $4 / $20 per 1M input/output tokens; Carbon is $2 / $10 through 30 November 2026 and the same $4 / $20 from 1 December. Artificial Analysis measured $5.48 per Index task for Carbon (high) vs $10.04 for Opus 5.5 (max).

These are Google-reported results as of October 2026, not an independent head-to-head. Source: Google DeepMind, results as of October 2026, retrieved 14 November 2026 · Source: Google AI Studio / Gemini API docs, Retrieved 13 November 2026 · Source: Anthropic, Retrieved 13 November 2026

Coding: what the table says

People search “gemini 4 carbon vs opus 5.5 coding”. In Google’s table the three agentic-coding rows split: Carbon leads SWE-sweep (9.6% vs 3.6%) and Terminal-Bench 4.0 (65.2% vs 59.6%); Opus 5.5 leads FrontierSWE 2 (62.3% vs 61.2%). Opus 5.5 also leads computer use on OSWorld-2.1 (87.2% vs 81.5%). Argon is shown for reference.

Gemini 4 Carbon model card, Google DeepMind, results as of October 2026 (Google-run; cybersecurity via the Fairwind Program). Not reproduced by this site. Bold = higher of the columns shown.
Category	Benchmark	Notes	Gemini 4 Carbon	Claude Opus 5.5	Gemini 4 Argon
General	AA Index v5.0		59	58	50
General	Vals Index v2.2		70.4%	70.2%	69.2%
Agentic coding	SWE-sweep		9.6%	3.6%	4.3%
Agentic coding	FrontierSWE 2		61.2%	62.3%	55.0%
Agentic coding	Terminal-Bench 4.0	AA	65.2%	59.6%	57.1%
Computer use	Agents' Last Exam v1.1	Score	77.4%	71.6%	69.0%
Computer use	OSWorld-2.1	Offline subset	81.5%	87.2%	74.7%
Knowledge work	AutomationBench	Zapier	53.9%	42.5%	51.3%
Knowledge work	Vending-Bench 2	Bank balance	$16,484	$9,235	$13,718
Multimodal	Chartography		72.5%	66.3%	71.6%
Multimodal	Blueprint-Bench 2	Similarity score	58.6%	51.2%	54.4%
Long context	GraphWalks 256k–1M	BFS (F1)	96.2%	66.8%	84.2%
Science and math	RiemannBench		80.0%	69.6%	76.0%
Science and math	Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1	AA	64.8%	59.0%	52.9%
Cybersecurity	CWE-bench		71.0%	67.0%	68.0%
Cybersecurity	ExploitGym		54.8%	34.5%	42.0%
Cybersecurity	SEC-bench Pro		88.2%	—	83.4%

Speed and cost per task (Artificial Analysis)

Measured independently by Artificial Analysis on each vendor's own API (retrieved 14 November 2026); speed is averaged over the past 5 days and changes. A dash means AA had not published that figure. This site did not run these tests.
Model · thinking/effort level	AA Intelligence Index	Output speed (tok/s)	Minutes per AA Index task	Time to first answer token (s)
Gemini 4 Carbon · high	60	66	30.9	70.53
Gemini 4 Carbon · medium	58	61	27.9	22.18
Gemini 4 Carbon · low	54	51	28.0	13.89
Claude Opus 5.5 · max	59	114	25.4	396.07
Claude Opus 5.5 · xhigh	57	110	15.7	88.46
Claude Opus 5.5 · high	52	106	9.5	27.87
Claude Opus 5.5 · medium	48	105	6.9	17.60
Claude Opus 5.5 · low	35	105	3.0	5.02

The task-cost columns are our arithmetic on official list prices, assuming every model uses the same token counts — they do not (see output volume below), and Anthropic says its newer tokenizer produces about 30% more tokens for the same text. No cache, batch, or grounding fees. The last column is Artificial Analysis’s own measured average, at the prices AA used, for the variant named in brackets.
Model	Official list price (input / output per 1M)	Our arithmetic per task (50K in + 8K out)	×1,000 tasks	AA measured cost per Index task
Gemini 4 Carbon	$2 / $10 through 30 Nov 2026; $4 / $20 from 1 Dec 2026	$0.180 (to 30 Nov 2026) $0.360 (from 1 Dec 2026)	$180 $360	$5.48 (high)
Claude Opus 5.5	$4 / $20	$0.360	$360	$10.04 (max)

Output tokens Artificial Analysis recorded while running its whole Intelligence Index (more tokens = more cost and time for the same work): Gemini 4 Carbon: high 205M, medium 124M, low 83.9M; Claude Opus 5.5: max 218M, xhigh 101M, high 56.1M, medium 42.5M, low 21.1M.

Source: Artificial Analysis: Gemini 4 Carbon · Artificial Analysis: Claude Opus 5.5 (retrieved 14 November 2026)

Price notes

Opus 5.5: $4 input / $20 output per 1M tokens (Anthropic pricing page, retrieved 13 November 2026). Anthropic says Claude 4.7 and later use a tokenizer that produces about 30% more tokens for the same text, so equal per-token prices are not equal bills.
Carbon: $2 / $10 through 30 November 2026, then $4 / $20; no free API tier.
Cheaper Google option: Gemini 4 Hydrogen at $1.50 / $7.50 — see Hydrogen vs Opus 5.5.

More comparisons Gemini 4 Argon vs Carbon Hydrogen vs Argon / Carbon Hydrogen vs Opus 5.5 All comparisons Cost calculator Pricing

Same prompt, side by side: community runs

Author-stated time and cost from public posts, not our benchmark. All same-prompt comparisons →

UP house — same reference, one shot

Author says: same prompt · XHigh (author label) · @noclipepe, 2026-11-13

Model	Time	Cost / quota
Gemini 4 Hydrogen	12m 49s	~$1.09
Gemini 4 Carbon	24m 45s	~$1.90
Claude Opus 5.5	36m 46s	~$4.20
Claude Fable 5.2	45m 44s	$19.10

Same prompt, same reference, XHigh, one shot — per the author. Fable made the author's best house; Hydrogen the 'haunted version'. Low cost is not the same as best quality.

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