$ diff qwen-3-8 claude-opus-5
Qwen 3.8 Max vs Claude Opus 5
Values come from Qwen 3.8 Max and Claude Opus 5, where each is cited to its source. This page states no benchmark result and ranks neither model — it puts two published specifications next to each other. Where a lab has not published a figure, the row says so rather than guessing.
Alibaba QwenQwen 3.8 Max
- context
- 1M
- weights
- open
- $/M in
- $2
- $/M out
- $6
- context
- 1M
- weights
- closed
- $/M in
- $5
- $/M out
- $25
What actually differs
- Context window
- Identical — both accept 1M tokens, so context length is not a reason to pick either.
- Input price
- Qwen 3.8 Max at $2/M against $5/M — 2.5× cheaper to feed.
- Output price
- Qwen 3.8 Max at $6/M against $25/M — 4.2× cheaper to generate. Output dominates the bill on most agentic workloads, where the model writes far more than it reads.
- Weights
- Qwen 3.8 Max publishes weights (Open-weight announced for the week of 2026-08-10; not yet shipped); Claude Opus 5 is API-only. That decides self-hosting, air-gapped deployment and fine-tuning before any capability question does.
- Recency
- Qwen 3.8 Max shipped 10 days after Claude Opus 5 (2026-08-03 vs 2026-07-24).
Full spec
| Attribute | Qwen 3.8 Max | Claude Opus 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Alibaba Qwen | Anthropic |
| Released | 2026-08-03 | 2026-07-24 |
| Context window | 1 million tokens | 1M tokens |
| Pricing | $2 / M input · $6 / M output | $5/M input · $25/M output (standard); $10/M · $50/M (Fast mode, research preview) |
| License | Open-weight announced for the week of 2026-08-10; not yet shipped | proprietary |
| Availability | Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (global), QwenWork | Claude.ai, API (`claude-opus-5`), Bedrock (`anthropic.claude-opus-53`), Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry, Claude Code, Cowork |