Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Qwen3.5 397B A17B (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 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)On the frontier

Intelligence: 53.60
Total cost: $2172

AlibabaQwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 18.40
Total cost: $941

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 35.2 points higher (53.6 vs 18.4) but costs 2.3× as much to run the benchmark ($2172 vs $941; flagship vs premium cost classes). Pick Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning).

Metric	Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)	Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	53.6	18.4	−65.7% Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Re… is 65.7% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,172.43	$940.97	−56.7% Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Re… is 56.7% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	41.01s	65.86s	+60.6% Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Re… is 60.6% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$4.00 / $20.0	$0.60 / $3.60
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback): 65.7% less intelligence, 56.7% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 60.6% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback): what beats it Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) is on today's frontier: nothing is both smarter and cheaper.
Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Xhigh) scores 51.00 for $662.

Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)Qwen3.5 397B A17B (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-5-5-high/qwen3-5-397b-a17b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5-5-high/qwen3-5-397b-a17b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill