# Claude Sonnet 5 vs O3 Mini

As of Oct 15, 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 leads O3 Mini in 3 of 4 shared categories: Reasoning, Science, and Long context.

Claude Sonnet 5: $4.000000000000001 per 1M blended tokens.

O3 Mini: $1.9250000000000003 per 1M blended tokens.

Claude Sonnet 5: closed weights.

O3 Mini: closed weights.

- Which to pick, General LLM: As of Oct 15, 2026, O3 Mini leads Claude Sonnet 5 in General LLM at #10 against #50.
- Which to pick, Reasoning: As of Oct 15, 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 leads O3 Mini in Reasoning at #40 against #172.
- Which to pick, Science: As of Oct 15, 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 leads O3 Mini in Science at #32 against #76.
- Which to pick, Long context: As of Oct 15, 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 leads O3 Mini in Long context at #36 against #186.

As of Oct 15, 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 is ranked #19 in Coding (since Oct 15, 2026; sources Terminal-Bench 4.0; methodology v1.0).

As of Oct 15, 2026, O3 Mini is a former state-of-the-art holder in Reasoning (since Feb 9, 2025; sources LMArena Text (style-controlled, hard prompts); methodology v1.0).