Claude Opus 4.5 vs Mistral Small 3 24B

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.

Mistral Small 3 24B

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3 is a 24-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Mistral AI, released in January 2025 as an update to the Mistral Small line with targeted improvements to instruction-following, multilingual reasoning, and structured output quality. Released under Apache 2.0, it was designed for deployment on a single high-VRAM GPU, continuing Mistral's focus on practical efficiency over maximum scale. The model became a widely-used option for teams building internal tooling, customer-facing applications, and local inference pipelines that needed strong general capability without the operational overhead of larger models.