Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) vs Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Which is better for the money: Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) by Anthropic or Qwen3.8 Max (0902) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Trade-off
Verdict
Depends on your budget
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scores 24.7 points higher (45.4 vs 20.7) but costs 3.3× as much to run the benchmark ($4935 vs $1501; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when you need intelligence above 20.7, and Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) when 20.7 is enough.
| Metric | Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) | Qwen3.8 Max (0902) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 20.7 | 45.4 | +119.3% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 2.2× more intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $1,501.22 | $4,934.79 | +228.7% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 3.3× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 21.53s | 62.92s | +192.2% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 192.2% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $3.00 / $15.0 | $2.00 / $6.00 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text, Image |
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) vs Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning): 119.3% more intelligence, 228.7% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 192.2% slower end-to-end.
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
- Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Reasoning)Qwen3.8 Max (0902)Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model
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