Claude Sonnet 5 (High) vs Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5 (High) 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 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 5 (High)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 31.70
Total cost: $2086

AlibabaQwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 12.70
Total cost: $234

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 5 (High) scores 19.0 points higher (31.7 vs 12.7) but costs 8.9× as much to run the benchmark ($2086 vs $234; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5 (High) when you need intelligence above 12.7, and Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) when 12.7 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 5 (High)	Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	31.7	12.7	−59.9% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 59.9% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$2,086.04	$233.56	−88.8% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 88.8% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	21.46s	22.73s	+5.9% Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 … is 5.9% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$2.00 / $10.0	$0.23 / $2.30
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning) vs Claude Sonnet 5 (High): 59.9% less intelligence, 88.8% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 5.9% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 5 (High): what beats it Qwen3 235B A22B 2507 (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 5 (High) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.
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 Sonnet 5 (High)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-sonnet-5-high/qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-high/qwen3-235b-a22b-instruct-2507-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill