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Qwen 3 Max vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Qwen vs Anthropic. Specs, benchmarks, and real per-task cost — all in one page.

Verdict

Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on LMSYS ELO (1368 vs 1295). Qwen 3 Max is ~2.1× cheaper on a 3:1 input:output blend. Qwen 3 Max is open-weights, the other is proprietary.

Qwen

Qwen 3 Max

Alibaba’s flagship. Strongest non-English coverage of any open model; dominant in Asian markets.

MultilingualOpen weightsCompetitive coding

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.6

The workhorse. Near-Opus quality at 1/5 the cost. The default choice for production code and agent workloads.

Excellent cost/quality ratioFast inferenceGreat for Cursor/Claude Code

Pricing

Input / 1M$1.60$3.00

Output / 1M$6.40$15.00

Context128K500K

Max output16K64K

LicenseOpen weightsProprietary

Released2025-11-202025-11-04

Benchmarks

LMSYS ELO1295.01368.0

MMLU Pro84.088.7

HumanEval87.292.1

SWE-Bench—64.5

MATH85.185.0

GPQA—59.4

MMMU71.874.1

IFEval85.590.5

Per-task cost

Summarize a 1-hour meeting transcript$0.027$0.052

Review a 500-line pull request$0.026$0.054

Answer a customer support ticket$0.0099$0.021

Extract structured data from a resume$0.014$0.030

Debug a stack trace with context$0.022$0.048

Per-call cost using published token counts for each task. Real-world prompts vary.

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