Claude Opus 4.5 vs Codestral 22B

Claude Opus 4.5

Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.5, released by Anthropic in November 2025, is a large language model from the Claude 4.5 family built for demanding reasoning tasks, advanced code generation, and complex agentic workflows. It features a 200K token context window, 64K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking with configurable effort levels. Opus 4.5 targets deep analytical work, multi-step tool orchestration, and applications requiring sustained reasoning across long, complex tasks.

Codestral 22B

Mistral AI

Codestral is a 22-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Mistral AI, released in May 2024 as the company's first dedicated coding model, trained with focus on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion, code generation, and repair across 80+ programming languages. Unlike Mistral's general-purpose Apache 2.0 models, Codestral was released under a separate non-production research license, reflecting its positioning as a professional coding tool requiring commercial API access for production deployment. Its FIM support made it particularly valued for IDE integrations and code completion tools that need to insert code within existing contexts rather than only appending to the end.