Claude Opus 4.8 vs Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B)

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Claude Opus 4.8 Anthropic's Opus-tier model (May 2026) with improved coding, agentic, and honesty behavior over Opus 4.7.	Qwen3.5 (397B-A17B) Alibaba's Apache-2.0 open-weight Qwen3.5 flagship MoE with very low active-parameter cost and broad multilingual coverage.
Category	model	model
Vendor type	commercial	open source
Pricing	usage	free
Strengths	+ Vendor-reported gains on coding and agentic benchmarks (Terminal-Bench 2.1, 84% on Online-Mind2Web) + Improved honesty; more likely to acknowledge missing information and flag flaws in its own code + Standard pricing unchanged from Opus 4.7 ($5 input / $25 output per million tokens), with a cheaper fast mode than before	+ Permissive Apache 2.0 license + Only 17B active parameters, enabling comparatively cheap inference + First-class MCP and tool-calling support via Qwen-Agent + 201-language coverage for multilingual agents
Tradeoffs	− Superseded as Anthropic's top model by Claude Fable 5 (June 2026) for the most demanding long-horizon work − API-only commercial model; no open weights	− Long context beyond 262K requires YaRN extension rather than native support − Flagship commercial Qwen3-Max capabilities are not part of the open release
Used in stacks	0	0