Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) vs. Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)

Comparison between Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) and Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning) across intelligence, price, speed, context window and more.

For details relating to our methodology, see our Methodology page.

	Alibaba	Anthropic
Intelligence
Cost
Price per 1M Tokens	$0.425	$3.85
Input Price per 1M Tokens	$0.25	$5.00
Output Price per 1M Tokens	$2.00	$25.00
Cache Hit Price per 1M Tokens		$0.50
Token Use
Performance
Output Speed	152 tokens/s	56 tokens/s
Time to First Token	2.00s	14.24s
Time to First Answer Token	15.13s	14.24s
End-to-End Response Time	18.41s	23.22s
Technical specifications
Context Window	262k tokens~393 A4 pages of size 12 Arial font	200k tokens~300 A4 pages of size 12 Arial font
Release Date	February 2026	November 2025
Knowledge Cutoff		August 2025
Total parameters	36B
Active parameters	3B
Reasoning	Yes	Yes
Input modality	Supports: text and image	Supports: text and image
Output modality	Supports: text	Supports: text
Open Source (Weights)	Yes	No
License	Apache 2.0
License Supports Commercial Use Without Restrictions	Yes

Updated

Intelligence

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Higher is better

No data available

Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

Cost per Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Lower is better

No data available

IntelligenceUpdated

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 incorporates 9 evaluations: AA-Briefcase v1.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, FrontierCode 2.0, AA-Omniscience v1.1, GDP.pdf, HLE-Diamond, CritPt v2 (Hard Subset), and Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1

No publicly available API

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 includes: AA-Briefcase v1.1, AutomationBench-AA, Terminal-Bench 4.0, FrontierCode 2.0, AA-Omniscience v1.1, GDP.pdf, HLE-Diamond, CritPt v2 (Hard Subset), Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1. See Intelligence Index methodology for further details, including a breakdown of each evaluation and how we run them.

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary

No publicly available API

Indicates whether the model weights are available. Models are labelled as 'Commercial Use Restricted' if commercial use is limited by conditions, and as 'Non-commercial' if the license prohibits commercial use.

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task

Most attractive quadrant

Pareto line

AA-Briefcase v1.1

AutomationBench-AA

Cost per Task (USD, Log Scale)

Weighted average cost per Intelligence Index task. Each evaluation’s cost is calculated from input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices, divided by task count, and weighted by its Intelligence Index weight.

Benchmarks

Evaluations

Evaluations measured independently by Artificial Analysis · AA-PersonalityBench scores are percentile ranks from 1 to 100

No publicly available API

AA-Briefcase v1.1

Agentic knowledge work, Elo

AA-Omniscience v1.1 AccuracyUpdated

Knowledge

AA-Omniscience v1.1 Non-Hallucination RateUpdated

1 - hallucination rate

AutomationBench-AA

Agentic SaaS workflows

Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1New

Agentic scientific research workflows in a terminal

FrontierCode 2.0New

Agentic software engineering in open-source repositories

HLE-DiamondNew

Reasoning & knowledge

GDP.pdf

Professional document reasoning, All-pass

Terminal-Bench 4.0

Agentic coding & terminal use

CritPt v2 (Hard Subset)

Physics reasoning

AA-AnalystAgent

Quantitative analysis on spreadsheets & documents

Harvey LAB-AA v1.1Updated

Legal agentic work, Hallucination-Gated All-Pass Rate

EnterpriseOps-Gym-AA

Agentic business operations

GDPval-AA v2.1

Agentic real-world work tasks, Elo

AA-3DNew

Agentic interactive 3D experiences, Elo

Code2Video-AANew

Product and brand videos designed in code, Elo

ITBench-AA

Kubernetes incident root-cause analysis

MLCR-AAUpdated

Medical long context reasoning

MMMU-Pro

Visual reasoning

AA-PersonalityBench: Expressiveness ScoreNew

Rich, varied, well-crafted language

AA-PersonalityBench: Organization ScoreNew

Well-structured, scannable, answer-first

AA-PersonalityBench: Transparency ScoreNew

Truthful, acknowledges uncertainty, non-sycophantic

AA-PersonalityBench: Slop ScoreNew

Use of filler and generic language

While model intelligence generally translates across use cases, specific evaluations may be more relevant for certain use cases.

Openness Index

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Openness Index assesses model openness on a 0 to 100 normalized scale (higher is more open)

Intelligence Index Comparisons

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · Weighted average cost (USD) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task

Most attractive quadrant

Pareto line

AA-Briefcase v1.1

AutomationBench-AA

Cost per Task (USD, Log Scale)

Cost

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average cost (USD) per Intelligence Index task · Segmented by token type · Lower is better

No publicly available API

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost (USD) to run all evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

No publicly available API

The cost to run the evaluations in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, calculated using the model's input, cache hit, cache write, reasoning, and answer token prices and the number of tokens used across evaluations (excluding repeats).

Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output

Price (USD per M Tokens)

No publicly available API

Price per token for cached prompts (previously processed), typically offering a significant discount compared to regular input price, represented as USD per million tokens. The values shown here are the cache hit price; cache write and cache storage are billed separately and vary by provider — see "Cache pricing by provider" for detail.

Context Window

Context window: tokens limit · Higher is better

No publicly available API

Larger context windows are relevant to RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) LLM workflows which typically involve reasoning and information retrieval of large amounts of data.

Maximum number of combined input & output tokens. Output tokens commonly have a significantly lower limit (varied by model).

Speed

Measured by Output Speed (tokens per second)

Output Speed

Output tokens per second · Higher is better

No publicly available API

Tokens per second received while the model is generating tokens (ie. after first chunk has been received from the API for models which support streaming).

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Weighted average decode time (minutes) per Intelligence Index task · Excludes TTFT and overhead time · Lower is better

No publicly available API

The weighted average time (seconds) per Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index task. This is calculated by dividing output tokens per task by output speed, weighted by the relative weights of each benchmark in the Intelligence Index.

Latency

Measured by Time (seconds) to First Token

Latency: Time To First Answer Token

Seconds to first answer token received · Accounts for reasoning model 'thinking' time

No publicly available API

Time to first answer token received, in seconds, after API request sent. For reasoning models, this includes the 'thinking' time of the model before providing an answer. For models which do not support streaming, this represents time to receive the completion.

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, calculated based on time to first token, 'thinking' time for reasoning models, and output speed

End-to-End Response Time

Seconds to output 500 tokens, including reasoning model 'thinking' time · Lower is better

No publicly available API

Seconds to receive a 500 token response. Key components:

Input time: Time to receive the first response token
Thinking time (only for reasoning models): Time reasoning models spend outputting tokens to reason prior to providing an answer. Amount of tokens based on the average reasoning tokens across a diverse set of 60 prompts (methodology details).
Answer time: Time to generate 500 output tokens, based on output speed

Figures represent performance of the model's first-party API or the median across providers where a first-party API is not available.

Model Size (Open Weights Models Only)

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Comparison between total model parameters and parameters active during inference (billions)

The total number of trainable weights and biases in the model, expressed in billions. These parameters are learned during training and determine the model's ability to process and generate responses.

The number of parameters actually executed during each inference forward pass, expressed in billions. For Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, a routing mechanism selects a subset of experts per token, resulting in fewer active than total parameters. Dense models use all parameters, so active equals total.

Frequently Asked Questions

Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) is faster. Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) generates 152.3 tokens per second, compared with Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning) at 55.7 tokens per second.

Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) is cheaper. Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) costs $0.42 per 1M tokens, compared with Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning) at $3.85 per 1M tokens (7:2:1 cache hit/input/output ratio).

Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) has lower latency. Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) has a time to first token of 2.00s, compared with Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning) at 14.24s.

Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) has a larger context window. Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) supports 260k tokens, compared with Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning) at 200k tokens.

Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) vs. Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)

Intelligence

Speed

Cost per Task

IntelligenceUpdated

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Open Weights

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Benchmarks

Evaluations

Intelligence Evaluation Relevance

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Openness Index

Artificial Analysis Openness Index: Score

Intelligence Index Comparisons

Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Cost per Intelligence Index Task

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output

Cache Hit

Context Window

Context Window

Context Window for RAG

Context Window

Speed

Output Speed

Output Speed

Model Performance Representation

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Time per Intelligence Index Task

Latency

Latency: Time To First Answer Token

Time to First Answer Token

End-to-End Response Time

End-to-End Response Time

End-to-End Response Time

Model Performance Representation

Model Size (Open Weights Models Only)

Model Size: Total and Active Parameters

Total Parameters

Active Parameters at Inference Time

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is faster, Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) or Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)?

Which is cheaper, Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) or Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)?

Which has lower latency, Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) or Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)?

Which has a larger context window, Qwen3.5 35B A3B (Reasoning) or Claude Opus 4.5 (Reasoning)?