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Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct are closely matched at 10.1 and 4.4 on the LLM Stats Score.

Anthropic · Mistral AI · Updated for 2026

Which is better?

Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct are closely matched on the overall LLM Stats Score at 10.1 and 4.4.

In the 5 individual benchmarks reported for both models, Claude 3 Opus wins 3; this is a narrower head-to-head signal than the composite indexes.

Based on current LLM Stats indexes, shared benchmarks, pricing, and model metadata for 2026.

Choose Claude 3 Opus

  • you value its reported benchmark strengths — it wins 3 of 5 exact shared results

Choose Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

  • you want the most recent training data — it shipped Mar 2025
  • you need open weights you can self-host or fine-tune

At a glance

The differences that matter most.

Claude 3 Opus
Anthropic
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Mistral AI
Core performance indexes
LLM Stats Score
10.1
#251
4.4
#286
Reasoning
10.0
#245
4.4
#280
Coding
5.2
#191
9.8
#158
Cost, coverage & limits
Benchmark wins
3 of 5
2 of 5
Input price
$15.00 / M
— / M
Output price
$75.00 / M
— / M
Context window
200,000
—

Capability indexes

Additional strengths measured across groups of related public benchmarks

3 shared
Index
Claude 3 Opus
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Math
16.4#197
8.2#252
Finance
14.5#121
7.6#150
Legal
14.5#106
7.6#133
Conservative TrueSkill rating · higher is betterHow scores work

Individual benchmarks

11 reported for Claude 3 Opus · 9 for Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

5 shared

Claude 3 Opus outperforms in 3 benchmarks (GPQA, MMLU, MMLU-Pro), while Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct is better at 2 benchmarks (HumanEval, MATH).

Claude 3 Opus has a slight edge in benchmark performance.

Mon Aug 31 2026 • llm-stats.com

Human preference

Blind head-to-head votes and playground preference scores

Context Window

Maximum input and output token capacity

Only Claude 3 Opus specifies input context (200,000 tokens). Only Claude 3 Opus specifies output context (200,000 tokens).

Anthropic
Claude 3 Opus
Input200,000 tokens
Output200,000 tokens
Mistral AI
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Input- tokens
Output- tokens
Mon Aug 31 2026 • llm-stats.com

Input capabilities

Documented input modalities across available providers

Both Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct support multimodal inputs.

They are both capable of processing various types of data, offering versatility in application.

Claude 3 Opus

Text
Images
Audio
Video

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Text
Images
Audio
Video

License

Usage and distribution terms

Claude 3 Opus is licensed under a proprietary license, while Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct uses Apache 2.0.

License differences may affect how you can use these models in commercial or open-source projects.

Claude 3 Opus

Proprietary

Closed source

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Apache 2.0

Open weights

Release Timeline

When each model was launched

Claude 3 Opus was released on 2024-02-29, while Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct was released on 2025-03-17.

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct is 13 months newer than Claude 3 Opus.

Claude 3 Opus

Feb 29, 2024

2.5 years ago

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Mar 17, 2025

1.5 years ago

1.0yr newer

Knowledge Cutoff

When training data ends

Neither model specifies a knowledge cutoff date.

Unable to compare the recency of their training data.

No cutoff dates available

Outputs Comparison

Notice missing or incorrect data?Start an Issue discussion→

Judge for yourself.

Run your own prompts against Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct side-by-side, then vote on the output you prefer.

Claude 3 Opus
✓ Preferred
Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct
Open in Playground

FAQ

Common questions about Claude 3 Opus vs Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct.

Which is better, Claude 3 Opus or Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct?

Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct are closely matched on the LLM Stats Score at 10.1 and 4.4. Claude 3 Opus is made by Anthropic and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct is made by Mistral AI. The best choice depends on your use case — compare their capability indexes, individual benchmarks, pricing, and limits above.

How does Claude 3 Opus compare to Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct in benchmarks?

Claude 3 Opus scores ARC-C: 96.4%, HellaSwag: 95.4%, GSM8k: 95.0%, MGSM: 90.7%, BIG-Bench Hard: 86.8%. Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct scores HumanEval: 88.4%, MMLU: 80.6%, TriviaQA: 80.5%, MBPP: 74.7%, MATH: 69.3%.

What are the context window sizes for Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct?

Claude 3 Opus supports 200K tokens and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct supports an unknown number of tokens. A larger context window lets you process longer documents, conversations, or codebases in a single request.

What are the main differences between Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct?

Key differences include LLM Stats Score (10.1 vs 4.4), licensing (Proprietary vs Apache 2.0). See the full comparison above for benchmark-by-benchmark results.

Who makes Claude 3 Opus and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct?

Claude 3 Opus is developed by Anthropic and Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct is developed by Mistral AI.

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