Head to head: Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.8 vs Google: Gemini 3.5 Flash

This one is close on the aggregate, but the split tells a clear story: Gemini 3.5 Flash wins by being more disciplined about format and slightly sharper on practical instruction-following. Claude Opus 4.8 lands the strongest single extraction/summarization performance, yet gives away too much on avoidable execution det