Claude Opus 4.8 vs Qwen 3 Max

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.	Qwen 3 Max Alibaba's open-weights frontier model; very strong on Chinese + code.
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	+ Open weights + Best-in-class for Chinese-language workloads + Strong on coding benchmarks
Tradeoffs	− Superseded as Anthropic's top model by Claude Fable 5 (June 2026) for the most demanding long-horizon work − API-only commercial model; no open weights	− Inference infra is the team's problem
Used in stacks	0	0