Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) vs Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, 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 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

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

Intelligence: 51.90
Total cost: $2177

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

Intelligence: 18.40
Total cost: $941

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallb… scores 33.5 points higher (51.9 vs 18.4) but costs 2.3× as much to run the benchmark ($2177 vs $941; flagship vs premium cost classes). Pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallb… when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning).

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback)	Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	51.9	18.4	−64.5% Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Re… is 64.5% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,176.82	$940.97	−56.8% Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Re… is 56.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	33.80s	65.18s	+92.8% Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Re… is 92.8% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.60 / $3.60
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback): 64.5% less intelligence, 56.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 92.8% slower end-to-end.

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

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (High, Default Fallback) scores 53.60 for $2172.
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 Sonnet 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback)Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights 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-xhigh/qwen3-5-397b-a17b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-xhigh/qwen3-5-397b-a17b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill