Google has not published a Hydrogen-vs-Opus 5.5 benchmark. On list price, Opus 5.5 is $4 / $20 per 1M input/output tokens versus Hydrogen’s $1.50 / $7.50 — about 2.7× more. On the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Opus 5.5 (max) scores 59 and Hydrogen 54 at xhigh. Google’s own counterpart to Opus is Gemini 4 Carbon (AA 60 at high), which moves to the same $4 / $20 list price on 1 December 2026.
Prices are official list prices retrieved 13 November 2026. Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index figures are from Artificial Analysis model pages retrieved the same day (Hydrogen high = 51 is Google’s citation in its announcement). This site has not run these models. Source: Google AI Studio / Gemini API docs, Retrieved 13 November 2026 · Source: Anthropic, Retrieved 13 November 2026 · Source: Google Blog, 12 November 2026
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen | Claude Opus 5.5 | Gemini 4 Carbon | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M | $1.50 | $4 | $2 through 30 Nov 2026, then $4 |
| Output / 1M | $7.50 | $20 | $10 through 30 Nov 2026, then $20 |
| Cache hits / 1M | $0.075 | $0.20 (0.05× base input) | $0.10, then $0.20 |
| Free API tier | Yes (rate-limited) | Free credits for new users | Not available |
| AA Intelligence Index | 54 (xhigh) · 51 (high) — AA | 59 (max) — AA | 60 (high) — AA |
10M input + 2M output tokens: Hydrogen $30; Opus 5.5 10 × $4 + 2 × $20 = $80; Carbon $40 in November and $80 from December. Per-token prices are not perfectly comparable across vendors: Anthropic’s pricing page says Claude 4.7 and later models use a newer tokenizer that produces about 30% more tokens for the same text.
Google positions Hydrogen as the fast execution model and Carbon/Argon as frontier models for deep, long-horizon reasoning. Its announcement describes Carbon coordinating while Hydrogen powers worker and verifier agents, and says Orchestrator in Antigravity reached near-Carbon task success on Terminal-Bench 4.0 while using 24% less quota and finishing 19% faster. A similar split (frontier planner, cheaper executor) is a common way to use Opus-class models too, but no published test compares Hydrogen and Opus 5.5 directly. Source: Google Blog, 12 November 2026
More comparisons vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol vs Gemini 3.1 Pro vs 3.8 Flash vs Argon / Carbon All benchmarks Pricing
Have you tried Hydrogen against one of these? Submit your case — real public posts get listed and ranked.
Author-stated time and cost from public posts, not our benchmark. All same-prompt comparisons →
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.
At its default high level, Hydrogen measured 171 output tokens/s and 8.3 minutes per Artificial Analysis Index task; the fastest level of the other models here measured 114 tok/s, so Hydrogen streamed about 1.5× as fast in AA’s runs.
| Model · thinking/effort level | AA Intelligence Index | Output speed (tok/s) | Minutes per AA Index task | Time to first answer token (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen · xhigh | 54 | 178 | 14.5 | 44.79 |
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen · high | 51 | 171 | 8.3 | 17.37 |
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen · medium | 41 | 174 | 3.8 | 11.81 |
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen · low | 27 | 173 | 1.4 | 5.58 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 Hydrogen | $1.50 / $7.50 flat | $0.135 | $135 | $3.16 (xhigh) |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 / $20 | $0.360 | $360 | $10.04 (max) |
| 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) |
Output tokens Artificial Analysis recorded while running its whole Intelligence Index (more tokens = more cost and time for the same work): Gemini 4 Hydrogen: xhigh 304M, high 110M, medium 54.4M, low 20.3M; Claude Opus 5.5: max 218M, xhigh 101M, high 56.1M, medium 42.5M, low 21.1M; Gemini 4 Carbon: high 205M, medium 124M, low 83.9M.
Source: Artificial Analysis: Gemini 4 Hydrogen · Artificial Analysis: Claude Opus 5.5 · Artificial Analysis: Gemini 4 Carbon (retrieved 14 November 2026) · Source: Google AI Studio / Gemini API docs, Retrieved 13 November 2026
Plug in your own token counts: Hydrogen cost calculator · all comparisons.