Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) vs Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) by Anthropic or Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 4.8 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 41.80
Total cost: $6874

AlibabaQwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 12.70
Total cost: $234

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) scores 29.1 points higher (41.8 vs 12.7) but costs 29× as much to run the benchmark ($6874 vs $234; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) when you need intelligence above 12.7, and Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) when 12.7 is enough.

Metric	Claude Opus 4.8 (Max)	Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	41.8	12.7	−69.6% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 69.6% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$6,873.86	$233.56	−96.6% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 96.6% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	51.76s	22.73s	−56.1% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 56.1% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$5.00 / $25.0	$0.23 / $2.30
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 4.8 (Max): 69.6% less intelligence, 96.6% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 56.1% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 4.8 (Max): what beats it Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 4.8 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.

Claude Opus 4.8 (Max)Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-4-8/qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-4-8/qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill