Anthropic vs Google Vertex AI
Same workloads, both price lists, refreshed daily. List prices tie on all 16 shared line items today, so the choice comes down to platform differences (routing, limits, tooling), summarized below.
Anthropic
Claude models via first-party API. Strong at coding, agents and long-context work.
- Frontier coding/agent models
- 200K+ context
- Prompt caching up to 90% off inputs
Google Vertex AI
Gemini plus 100+ models in Google Cloud's ML platform, with enterprise governance, grounding and tuning pipelines..
- Enterprise governance
- Grounding with Google Search
- Model Garden variety
Shared models, priced by both
List prices refreshed 2026-08-23 ยท input $/1M tokens| Model | Anthropic in/out | Google Vertex AI in/out | Cheaper input |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude 3 Haiku | $0.250 / $1.25 | $0.250 / $1.25 | tie |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 / $5.00 | $1.00 / $5.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 / $10.00 | $2.00 / $10.00 | tie |
| Claude-3.7-Sonnet | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 4 | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $3.00 / $15.00 | $3.00 / $15.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.00 / $25.00 | tie |
| Claude Fable 5 | $10.00 / $50.00 | $10.00 / $50.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4 | $15.00 / $75.00 | $15.00 / $75.00 | tie |
| Claude Opus 4.1 | $15.00 / $75.00 | $15.00 / $75.00 | tie |
| Claude-3-Opus | $15.00 / $75.00 | $15.00 / $75.00 | tie |
Cheaper-on-count is a tally of listed prices, not a quality verdict: throughput, reliability and quantization differ between providers. Disclosure.