Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs Qwen3.8 Max (0902)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) 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

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

Intelligence: 40.80
Total cost: $622

AlibabaQwen3.8 Max (0902)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 45.40
Total cost: $4935

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scores 4.6 points higher (45.4 vs 40.8) but costs 7.9× as much to run the benchmark ($4935 vs $622; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when you need intelligence above 40.8, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… when 40.8 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)	Qwen3.8 Max (0902)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	40.8	45.4	+11.3% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 11.3% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$622.28	$4,934.79	+693.0% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 7.9× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	6.20s	64.02s	+932.6% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 932.6% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$2.00 / $6.00
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 11.3% more intelligence, 693.0% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 932.6% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): what beats it Qwen3.8 Max (0902): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.
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 Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Qwen3.8 Max (0902)Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/qwen3-8-max · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/qwen3-8-max?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill