Agent Arena: Opus Performance Gains Come With Massive Token Spike

arena · x · 2026-08-08

Agent Arena tracks token usage for real-world tasks and found that Anthropic's Opus series saw a significant performance boost (4.7 to 5) alongside a massive increase in token consumption, jumping from 8.5k to 21k (reasoning + output).

Conversely, top GPT models show the opposite trend. Between GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.6-Sol, token usage dropped from 10k to 8k, despite a 1.5pp net performance gain.

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