Google DeepMind dropped Gemini 3.8 Flash on September 2, and it’s already picking fights above its weight class. The model outperforms Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5, a model that costs roughly seven times more per output token, on several critical benchmarks spanning coding, multi-step reasoning, and legal task performance.
The kicker: Gemini 3.8 Flash is priced at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. Claude Opus 5 runs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens.
The benchmark breakdown
Gemini 3.8 Flash posted a 54.9% score on HLE-Verified, a demanding multi-step reasoning evaluation that spans STEM, humanities, and other disciplines.
The model also outperformed larger frontier models on the DeepSWE v1.1 benchmark, which measures performance on complex engineering problem-solving tasks.
