Claude Fable 5 vs Qwen3.6 Plus
Full profiles: Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic) and Qwen3.6 Plus (Alibaba): every benchmark, price and rank.
Updated · Data from 11 sources
As of 29 Oct 2026, Claude Fable 5 is ahead of Qwen3.6 Plus on quality (66.6 vs 59.1 on the BenchLeader Index), but Qwen3.6 Plus is 18× cheaper at $1.13 vs $20.00 per 1M tokens blended. Claude Fable 5 leads in every category we measure both in.
Key facts (as of 29 Oct 2026)
- Claude Fable 5 scores 66.6 on the BenchLeader Index and Qwen3.6 Plus scores 59.1 (BenchLeader, 29 Oct 2026).
- Claude Fable 5 costs $20.00 per 1M tokens blended (list price, 29 Oct 2026).
- Qwen3.6 Plus costs $1.13 per 1M tokens blended (list price, 29 Oct 2026).
- Of the 23 benchmarks both models have, Claude Fable 5 leads 22 (BenchLeader, 29 Oct 2026).
Claude Fable 5 benchmarks 
Qwen3.6 Plus benchmarks Which to pick for…
The pick's numbers come first. Category scores on the BenchLeader scale (50 is the average model, 15 points one standard deviation). High confidence means a lead of half a standard deviation or more; under one point is called either.
| Use case | Pick | Why | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | Claude Fable 5 | 70 vs 51 category score; LiveCodeBench 89.8% vs 86.0% | High |
| Agents & tool use | Claude Fable 5 | 64 vs 53 category score; Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) 80.5% vs 53.2% | High |
| Reasoning | Claude Fable 5 | 80 vs 63 category score; GPQA Diamond (Vals) 93.2% vs 87.4% | High |
| Knowledge | Claude Fable 5 | 67 vs 57 category score; MMLU-Pro 91.5% vs 87.7% | High |
| Chat quality (human preference) | Claude Fable 5 | 68 vs 63 on Arena votes | Medium |
| Lowest cost | Qwen3.6 Plus | $1.13 vs $20.00 per 1M blended; agentic coding session $0.042 vs $0.800 | – |
| Fastest first answer | Claude Fable 5 | 3.8 s (Claude Fable 5) vs 101.3 s (Qwen3.6 Plus) to the first answer token | – |
| High volume on a budget | Neither flagship | A smaller model is usually the better fit: Cheapest good LLMs, Fastest LLMs | – |
Key differences
- Claude Fable 5 leads on quality: 66.6 vs 59.1.
- Claude Fable 5 is stronger in agents & tools, coding, human preference, knowledge, reasoning.
- Qwen3.6 Plus is stronger in instruction following, long context, maths, multimodal.
- Qwen3.6 Plus is 18× cheaper ($1.13 vs $20.00 per 1M blended).
At a glance
| Spec | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Anthropic | Alibaba |
| Released | 9 Jun 2026 | 31 Mar 2026 |
| Context window (tokens) | 1,000,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Compared at | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
| Open weights | No | No |
| Price in / out / cached input per 1M | $10.00 / $50.00 / $1.00 | $0.500 / $3.00 / $0.050 |
Category by category
Category scores on the BenchLeader scale: 50 is the average evaluated model, 15 points is one standard deviation. A gap under one point is called level.
| Category | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reasoning | 80.0 | 63.3 | Claude Fable 5 |
| Coding | 70.4 | 51.0 | Claude Fable 5 |
| Agents & tools | 64.2 | 53.1 | Claude Fable 5 |
| Maths | – | 57.9 | not comparable |
| Knowledge | 66.5 | 57.0 | Claude Fable 5 |
| Instruction following | – | 73.3 | not comparable |
| Human preference | 67.7 | 62.5 | Claude Fable 5 |
| Multimodal | – | 60.6 | not comparable |
| Long context | – | 64.0 | not comparable |
Where sources disagree
Across the 23 benchmarks both have, Claude Fable 5 leads 22, Qwen3.6 Plus leads 1. Every overall index that rates both puts Claude Fable 5 ahead.
| Overall index | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen3.6 Plus | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 66.6 | 59.1 | Claude Fable 5 |
| Arena Text | 1504† | 1443 | Claude Fable 5 |
Each publisher runs its own tasks, harnesses and effort settings, so their overall verdicts can differ; BenchLeader reconciles them on one scale. † measured at another effort setting of the same model (the publisher did not test the one compared here).
Price, speed and latency
List prices blended at three input tokens per output token. Per-task prices use the token counts on the methodology page; suite cost is what Artificial Analysis paid to run its whole Intelligence Index.
| Measure | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Blended price per 1M tokens | $20.00 | $1.13 |
| Input / output per 1M | $10.00 / $50.00 | $0.500 / $3.00 |
| Cached input per 1M | $1.00 | $0.050 |
| Price per task: chat reply | $0.019 | $0.0011 |
| Price per task: summarize a 30-page report | $0.150 | $0.0078 |
| Price per task: code edit | $0.135 | $0.0075 |
| Price per task: agentic coding session | $0.800 | $0.042 |
| Price per task: structured extraction | $0.030 | $0.0016 |
| Output speed | 53 tok/s | 56 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 3.8 s | 101.3 s |
| Time to a complete answer | – | 110.2 s |
Each model is compared at its best-ranked reasoning-effort setting. Claude Fable 5 scores 66.6 and takes 4 s to its first answer token; Claude Fable 5 (max) scores 65.3 in 70 s, Claude Fable 5 (high) scores 64.5 in 4 s. Qwen3.6 Plus scores 59.1 and takes 101 s to its first answer token. Higher effort means more thinking before the answer: better scores, longer waits and more tokens billed. How reasoning effort changes scores and cost.
Every benchmark
118 benchmarks, grouped by category; each name links to the board and its leaders. † measured at another effort setting of the same model, shown for reference and not counted as a win.
| Metric | Publisher | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
|---|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | BenchLeader | 66.6 | 59.1 |
| Agents & tools score | BenchLeader | 64.2 | 53.1 |
| Coding score | BenchLeader | 70.4 | 51.0 |
| Human preference score | BenchLeader | 67.7 | 62.5 |
| Knowledge score | BenchLeader | 66.5 | 57.0 |
| Reasoning score | BenchLeader | 80.0 | 63.3 |
| Instruction following score | BenchLeader | – | 73.3 |
| Long context score | BenchLeader | – | 64.0 |
| Maths score | BenchLeader | – | 57.9 |
| Multimodal score | BenchLeader | – | 60.6 |
| Blended price $/M | BenchLeader | $20.00 | $1.13 |
| Output speed | BenchLeader | 53 tok/s | 56 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | BenchLeader | 3.8 s | 101.3 s |
| Context window | BenchLeader | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Reasoning | |||
| GPQA Diamond | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 85.9%† | 88.4% |
| SimpleBench | SimpleBench | 81.9%† | – |
| Arena Hard Prompts | Arena (LMArena) | 1529† | 1467 |
| LiveBench 1.0 Reasoning | LiveBench | 89.7%† | 75.8% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 92.6%† | 88.2% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 55.5%† | 27.9% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | Vals AI | 93.2% | 87.4% |
| EnigmaEval | Scale AI SEAL | 39.3%† | – |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | Kagi LLM Benchmark | 88.8% | – |
| ARC-AGI-1 | ARC Prize | 98.5%† | – |
| ARC-AGI-2 | ARC Prize | 89.2%† | – |
| CritPt | Artificial Analysis | 28.6%† | 2.9% |
| Chess Puzzles | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 47.0%† | 14.0% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 52.0%† | 12.0%† |
| CL-bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | – | 20.3% |
| LMCA | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 60.3%† | 33.1% |
| DTBench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 98.4%† | 81.9% |
| ForecastBench | ForecastBench | 66.0%† | – |
| BTF-3 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 13.0%† | – |
| Coding | |||
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | – | 57.9% |
| SciCode | SciCode | 61.0%† | 40.7% |
| WeirdML | WeirdML | 91.9%† | – |
| FrontierCode | Cognition | 53.5% | – |
| GSO-Bench | GSO-Bench | 78.4% | – |
| Arena Coding | Arena (LMArena) | 1550† | 1496 |
Show all 118 benchmarks
| Metric | Publisher | Claude Fable 5 | Qwen3.6 Plus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coding | |||
| Arena WebDev | Arena (LMArena) | 1624† | 1462 |
| LiveBench 1.0 Coding | LiveBench | 86.0%† | 78.2% |
| SciCode (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 61.0%† | – |
| LiveCodeBench | Vals AI | 89.8% | 86.0% |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | Vals AI | 95.0% | 73.4% |
| Code Migration | Vals AI | 55.1% | 11.1% |
| ProgramBench | Vals AI | 2.0% | 0.0% |
| Vibe Code Bench v1.1 | Vals AI | 90.3% | 25.6% |
| SWE Atlas: Codebase QnA | Scale AI SEAL | 39.0%† | – |
| SWE Atlas: Refactoring | Scale AI SEAL | 54.8%† | – |
| SWE Atlas: Test Writing | Scale AI SEAL | 55.6%† | – |
| MirrorCode | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 63.9%† | – |
| Surface Evolver Bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 95.0%† | – |
| DeepSWE v1.1 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 69.7%† | – |
| ALE-Bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 2041.3† | 670.1 |
| FrontierSWE | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 47.0%† | – |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 42.4%† | – |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 84.6%† | 61.4% |
| Startrise Frontend | Startrise | 73.8% | – |
| Agents & tools | |||
| Terminal-Bench | Terminal-Bench | 44.5%† | – |
| Remote Labor Index | Scale AI / CAIS | 16.1% | – |
| APEX-Agents | Mercor | 63.6% | – |
| Arena Agent | Arena (LMArena) | 8† | – |
| LiveBench Agentic Coding | LiveBench | 62.2%† | 41.4% |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | Artificial Analysis | 62.9%† | 43.9% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 98.5%† | 97.7% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | Vals AI | 80.5% | 53.2% |
| MCP Atlas | Scale AI SEAL | 83.3% | – |
| HiL-Bench | Scale AI SEAL | 56.3% | – |
| τ³-bench Banking | τ²-bench | 39.7%† | – |
| τ³-Banking (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 38.1%† | 20.8% |
| Analyst Agent (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 48.8%† | – |
| Finance Agent v2 | Vals AI | 56.3% | 40.9% |
| Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark v1 | Vals AI | 11.3% | 1.3% |
| Legal Research Bench | Vals AI | 49.5% | 14.9% |
| Tax Agent Bench | Vals AI | 38.3% | 7.7% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 (Vals) | Vals AI | – | 44.9% |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 (Vals) | Vals AI | 41.4% | – |
| Terminal-Bench Science | Vals AI | 15.7% | – |
| Web Search Index | Vals AI | 46.9% | – |
| Arena Search | Arena (LMArena) | 1229† | – |
| PostTrainBench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 41.8%† | – |
| GBAEval | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 74.5% | – |
| Vending-Bench 2 | Andon Labs | 4529.9 | 5114.9 |
| AutomationBench | Artificial Analysis | 54.1%† | – |
| GDP.pdf (AA) | Artificial Analysis | 24.0%† | – |
| EnterpriseOps-Gym | Artificial Analysis | 51.1%† | – |
| AA-Briefcase v1.1 | Artificial Analysis | 1535† | – |
| Maths | |||
| FrontierMath Tiers 1–3 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 87.0%† | 38.3% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 90.2%† | – |
| OTIS Mock AIME | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 99.7%† | 93.3% |
| ProofBench | Vals AI | 95.0%† | – |
| LiveBench Mathematics | LiveBench | 96.0%† | 83.7% |
| AIME (Vals) | Vals AI | – | 94.6% |
| Arena Maths | Arena (LMArena) | 1521† | 1453 |
| Knowledge | |||
| SimpleQA Verified | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 70.7%† | 44.1% |
| LiveBench 1.0 Data Analysis | LiveBench | 80.5%† | 69.9% |
| MMLU-Pro | Vals AI | 91.5% | 87.7% |
| LegalBench | Vals AI | 88.6% | 84.2% |
| CorpFin | Vals AI | 71.8% | 61.9% |
| TaxEval | Vals AI | 76.9% | 74.7% |
| PRBench Finance | Scale AI SEAL | 53.9% | – |
| PRBench Legal | Scale AI SEAL | 52.6% | – |
| CaseLaw v2 | Vals AI | – | 51.5% |
| Excel Modeling Benchmark | Vals AI | 73.7% | 32.9% |
| MedCode | Vals AI | 56.1% | 36.9% |
| MedScribe | Vals AI | 88.5% | 77.0% |
| Public Benefits Bench v1.1 | Vals AI | 70.4% | – |
| EBR-bench | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 39.5%† | – |
| GDP.pdf | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 30.0% | – |
| Instruction following | |||
| LiveBench Language | LiveBench | 90.7%† | 75.0% |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | LiveBench | 75.8%† | 58.3% |
| IFBench | Artificial Analysis | 63.5%† | 75.2% |
| Arena Instruction Following | Arena (LMArena) | 1509† | 1435 |
| Human preference | |||
| Arena Text | Arena (LMArena) | 1504† | 1443 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | EQ-Bench | 1313 | – |
| Arena Creative Writing | Arena (LMArena) | 1501† | 1406 |
| Arena Multi-turn | Arena (LMArena) | 1516† | 1445 |
| Arena Longer Queries | Arena (LMArena) | 1522† | 1454 |
| Multimodal | |||
| Arena Vision | Arena (LMArena) | 1325† | – |
| MMMU-Pro | Artificial Analysis | – | 78.0% |
| MMMU-Pro (Vals) | Vals AI | 89.3% | 84.2% |
| MortgageTax | Vals AI | 68.9% | 68.0% |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 38.6% | – |
| Long context | |||
| AA-LCR v1.1 | Artificial Analysis | 82.3%† | 78.3% |
| Arena Document | Arena (LMArena) | 1499 | – |
| MLCR | Artificial Analysis | 20.6%† | – |
| Composite | |||
| Epoch Capabilities Index | Epoch AI Benchmarking Hub | 163.1 | 147.3 |
| LiveBench 1.0 | LiveBench | 83.0%† | 68.9% |
| AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2 | Artificial Analysis | 49.6† | 27.0 |
| AA Progress Index v1 | Artificial Analysis | 329.3† | 283.4 |
| Vals RSI Index | Vals AI | 24.3%† | – |
| Vals Multimodal Index | Vals AI | 74.2% | 51.5% |
Data as of 2026-10-29. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
What changed
- Qwen3.6 Plus: 1 new result (AA Progress Index v1).
- Qwen3.6 Plus: BenchLeader Index 59.7 → 59.2.
- Qwen3.6 Plus: Qwen3.6 Plus cached input price moved from $0.028/M to $0.050/M (81% up).
- Claude Fable 5: BenchLeader Index 67.3 → 66.5.
- Claude Fable 5: 1 score revision.
- Qwen3.6 Plus: Qwen3.6 Plus cached input price moved from $0.050/M to $0.028/M (45% down).
- Qwen3.6 Plus: Qwen3.6 Plus cached input price moved from $0.028/M to $0.050/M (81% up).
- Claude Fable 5: 1 new result (Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark v1).
- Qwen3.6 Plus: 1 new result (Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark v1); Qwen3.6 Plus cached input price moved from $0.050/M to $0.028/M (45% down).
- Qwen3.6 Plus: Qwen3.6 Plus cached input price moved from $0.03/M to $0.05/M (81% up).
Related comparisons
- Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Opus 5.5
- Claude Fable 5 vs Gemini 4 Carbon
- Claude Fable 5 vs GPT-6 Astra
- Qwen3.6 Plus vs Claude Opus 5.5
- Qwen3.6 Plus vs Gemini 4 Carbon
- Qwen3.6 Plus vs GPT-6 Astra
- Qwen3.6 Plus vs GPT-6.1 Sol
- Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Fable 5.1
Rankings: Best LLM overall · Best LLM for coding · Best LLM for agents · Best cheap LLMs
Claude Fable 5 vs Qwen3.6 Plus: questions
- Is Claude Fable 5 better than Qwen3.6 Plus?
- Claude Fable 5 leads on quality: 66.6 vs 59.1. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Fable 5 is ahead overall as of 29 Oct 2026, but check the category scores for your use.
- Claude Fable 5 vs Qwen3.6 Plus: which is cheaper, and will that change?
- Qwen3.6 Plus is cheaper today: $1.13 against $20.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token. No price change has been announced for either.
- Is Claude Fable 5 or Qwen3.6 Plus better for coding?
- Claude Fable 5 scores higher in coding (70 vs 51 on the category index, where 50 is average). On LiveCodeBench, the top shared coding benchmark, it is 89.8% for Claude Fable 5 against 86.0% for Qwen3.6 Plus.
- Which is faster, Claude Fable 5 or Qwen3.6 Plus?
- Qwen3.6 Plus streams faster (56 vs 53 output tokens per second, Artificial Analysis 7-day median).
- Is Claude Fable 5 or Qwen3.6 Plus better for agents and tool use?
- Claude Fable 5 scores higher in agentic tasks (64 vs 53 on the category index, where 50 is average). On Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals), the top shared agents & tools benchmark, it is 80.5% for Claude Fable 5 against 53.2% for Qwen3.6 Plus.
More questions (4)
- Which is better for long documents?
- Both accept 1,000,000 tokens of context.
- Which has lower latency?
- Claude Fable 5 answers first: 3.8 s against 101.3 s to the first answer token, as Artificial Analysis measures it. Reasoning effort drives most of this: a higher setting thinks longer before it answers.
- Do independent benchmarks agree on Claude Fable 5 vs Qwen3.6 Plus?
- Across the 23 benchmarks both have, Claude Fable 5 leads 22, Qwen3.6 Plus leads 1. Every overall index that rates both puts Claude Fable 5 ahead.
- When was Claude Fable 5 released?
- Claude Fable 5 was released on 9 Jun 2026.