Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) vs Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 46.80
Total cost: $1027

AlibabaQwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 18.20
Total cost: $896

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallba… scores 28.6 points higher (46.8 vs 18.2) but costs 1.1× as much to run the benchmark ($1027 vs $896; both premium class). Pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallba… when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning).

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)	Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	46.8	18.2	−61.1% Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reas… is 61.1% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$1,027.40	$896.39	−12.8% Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reas… is 12.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	16.86s	46.69s	+176.9% Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reas… is 176.9% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.38 / $2.25
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Video

Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback): 61.1% less intelligence, 12.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 176.9% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback): what beats it Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Xhigh) scores 51.00 for $662.
Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Xhigh) scores 51.00 for $662.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (High, Default Fallback)Qwen3.6 35B A3B (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-sonnet-5-5-high/qwen3-6-35b-a3b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-high/qwen3-6-35b-a3b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill