Claude Opus 4.8 vs Qwen3 6
Claude Opus 4.8 
Qwen3 6 Verdict
- Claude Opus 4.8 leads on quality: 64.8 vs 63.3.
- Claude Opus 4.8 is stronger in coding, composite, knowledge, multimodal, reasoning.
- Qwen3 6 (max) is stronger in agents & tools, human preference, instruction following, long context, maths.
- Qwen3 6 (max) is 3.4× cheaper ($2.96 vs $10.00 per 1M blended).
| Metric | Claude Opus 4.8 | Qwen3 6 (max) |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 64.8 | 63.3 |
| Agents & tools score | 65.0 | 72.0 |
| Coding score | 65.6 | 58.2 |
| Composite score | 82.1 | 64.9 |
| Human preference score | 65.8 | 65.9 |
| Instruction following score | 61.8 | 74.2 |
| Knowledge score | 66.5 | 64.0 |
| Long context score | 65.4 | 66.9 |
| Multimodal score | 64.5 | – |
| Reasoning score | 64.6 | 63.2 |
| Maths score | – | 64.2 |
| Blended price $/M | $10.00 | $2.96 |
| Output speed | 56 tok/s | 59 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 29.3 s | 38.5 s |
| Context window | 1M | 246k |
| GPQA Diamond | – | 87.4% |
| OTIS Mock AIME | – | 91.1% |
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | – | 76.7% |
| SimpleQA Verified | – | 52.0% |
| SimpleBench | 64.8% | 63.0% |
| Remote Labor Index | 8.3% | – |
| FrontierCode | 46.5% | – |
| GSO-Bench | 47.1% | – |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 158.3 | 149.3 |
| LMArena Text | 1473 | 1460 |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1503 | 1482 |
| LMArena Coding | 1527 | 1509 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1540 | 1479 |
| LMArena Vision | 1289 | – |
| AA Intelligence Index | 42.0 | 28.4 |
| IFBench | 62.2% | 76.6% |
| AA-LCR | 77.7% | 80.7% |
| AA-Omniscience | 28.8 | 9.2 |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | 58.3% | 43.9% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 92.0% | 88.8% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 48.7% | 30.8% |
| SciCode (AA) | 54.4% | – |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | 94.4% | 95.9% |
| LiveCodeBench | 87.8% | – |
| MMLU-Pro | 89.6% | – |
| LegalBench | 83.6% | – |
| CorpFin | 66.7% | 66.5% |
| TaxEval | 75.6% | – |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | 71.9% | – |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | 88.6% | 72.8% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | 92.4% | – |
| Vals Index | 60.9 | – |
| HiL-Bench | 35.3% | – |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1281 | – |
Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Opus 4.8 vs Qwen3 6: questions
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Qwen3 6?
- Claude Opus 4.8 leads on quality: 64.8 vs 63.3. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Opus 4.8 is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Qwen3 6 for coding?
- Claude Opus 4.8 scores higher in coding (66 vs 58 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than Qwen3 6 for agentic tasks?
- Qwen3 6 scores higher in agentic tasks (72 vs 65 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Qwen3 6?
- Qwen3 6 is cheaper: $2.96 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which is faster, Claude Opus 4.8 or Qwen3 6?
- Qwen3 6 streams faster: 59 against 56 output tokens per second.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Claude Opus 4.8 accepts more context: 1M against 246k tokens.