In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- Gemini 4 Argon reads more at once: a context window of 1M tokens against 1M.
- On the 10 independent boards that rank both, Claude Sonnet 5.5 places higher on 6 and Gemini 4 Argon on 4.
Side by side
The specs.
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Gemini 4 Argon | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Anthropic · US | Google · US |
| Released | Sep 28, 2026 | Sep 30, 2026 |
| Price per 1M tokens | $2 in / $10 out | $2 in / $10 out (introductory price) |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image | text, image, video, audio, pdf |
| Download and run it yourself | No | No |
| Size | Not published | Not published |
| Maker says | “High-performance model for coding and agents” | “Our flagship reasoning model with a unified 1M context window and long decodes up to 1M tokens.” |
| Sources | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description |
Independent tests
Where they place.
Position on each board we follow (1 is best). Epoch AI's and Vectara's scores are shown; the other boards are linked for their own figures.
| Board | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Gemini 4 Argon |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities IndexEpoch AI, Oct 20, 2026 | #6164.45 | #5164.56 |
| LMArena textLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | Not listed | #1 |
| LMArena creative writingLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | Not listed | #2 |
| LMArena coding chatsLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | Not listed | #1 |
| LMArena WebDevLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | #3 | #10 |
| LMArena mathLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | #15 | #1 |
| LMArena Agent ArenaLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | #5 | #6 |
| Humanity's Last ExamScale AI | #6 | #3 |
| SWE-Bench ProScale AI, Sep 22, 2026 | #8 | #2 |
| Vals IndexVals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #1 | #3 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0Vals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #2 | #6 |
| Vibe Code BenchVals AI, Oct 18, 2026 | #1 | #2 |
| ProofBenchVals AI, Oct 12, 2026 | #1 | #7 |
| CUA-bench (games)Vals AI, Oct 13, 2026 | Not listed | #8 |
| Vectara hallucination testVectara, Oct 16, 2026 | Not listed | #8312.1% |
More comparisons