Claude Opus 5.5 vs Qwen3.8 Max 0902

The match-up at a glance

Claude Opus 5.5 and Qwen3.8 Max 0902 are two frontier models, the ones you pick when quality comes first, one from Anthropic, the other from Alibaba Cloud (Qwen). Claude Opus 5.5 was released on September 22, 2026, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 on September 2, 2026.

All figures below come from public sources checked on October 22, 2026: models.dev and OpenRouter for prices and capabilities, Epoch AI for scores.

Performance

On our capability index, Claude Opus 5.5 scores 95.9 out of 100 and Qwen3.8 Max 0902 88.4. Claude Opus 5.5 leads by 7.5 points.

On the 3 benchmarks reported for both, Claude Opus 5.5 wins 1 time and Qwen3.8 Max 0902 1:

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): Claude Opus 5.5 90.6%, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 92.3%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): Claude Opus 5.5 100%, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 100%
• FrontierMath (very hard research-level mathematics): Claude Opus 5.5 91.2%, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 65.6%

Pricing

Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens; Qwen3.8 Max 0902 costs $2 and $6.

For a typical agent task (read 20,000 tokens, write 2,000), expect $0.12 with Claude Opus 5.5 versus $0.052 with Qwen3.8 Max 0902. Qwen3.8 Max 0902 is 2.3 times cheaper, a gap that adds up quickly over 1,000 tasks: $68 difference.

Run the numbers with your own volumes in the agent cost calculator.

Features and limits

Both models have the same context window: 1,000,000 tokens, roughly 1,500 pages.

Reasoning mode: Claude Opus 5.5 yes, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 yes. Tool calling: Claude Opus 5.5 yes, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 yes. Image input: Claude Opus 5.5 yes, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 yes.

Neither publishes its weights: both are used through an API.

In short

Our reading of the data:

• Choose Claude Opus 5.5 for a higher capability index.
• Choose Qwen3.8 Max 0902 for a lower cost.

This verdict relies on public figures; it does not replace a trial on your own tasks.