claude-opus-4-6-thinking vs deepseek-r1-0528 Benchmark Comparison

Direct benchmark comparison between claude-opus-4-6-thinking and deepseek-r1-0528 based on LMArena Elo and the latest 2026 API pricing.

Direct Technical & Pricing Comparison

Frontier Model	LMArena Elo	API Cost (1M)	Throughput
claude-opus-4-6-thinking	1502	$0.000005	38
deepseek-r1-0528	1422	$5e-7	37

*These models represent the Pareto Frontier (optimal cost-to-performance).*

Comparison Summary: claude-opus-4-6-thinking is the more capable model in this pair, leading by 80 Elo points.