Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) is the pick when you need file / PDF input, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Qwen |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $2.50 | $2.00 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $12.50 | $6.00 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $5.00 | $3.00 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 10% | 21% |
| Context window | 1M tokens (~1,500 pages) | 1M tokens (~1,500 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 69% | 69% |
| Max output per response | 128K tokens (~96,000 words) | 131K tokens (~98,300 words) |
| Input types | text, image, file | text, image, video |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-07-24 | 2026-09-03 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $438 | $270 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) saves $168 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $425 | $300 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) saves $125 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $450 | $312 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) saves $138 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $275 | $196 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) saves $79.00 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $138 | $106 | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) saves $31.50 |
| Capability | Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) | Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | ✓ Yes | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | ✓ Yes | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | ✓ Yes | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) is the pick when you need file / PDF input, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when cost matters at scale. In short: Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) when you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when cost matters at scale, you need seed (reproducible sampling), you need log-probabilities.
Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is cheaper: $3.00 vs $5.00 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 40% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $270 against $438.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) costs $2.50 per 1M input tokens and $12.50 per 1M output tokens; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) costs $2.00 input and $6.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Both take 1M tokens per request — roughly 1,500 pages of text.
Tool calling — Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch): yes, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902): yes. JSON-schema structured output — Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch): yes, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902): yes.
Yes, both accept image input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) up to 131K (about 98,300 words).
Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) was listed on 2026-07-24; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) on 2026-09-03.
Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic’s flagship model for demanding reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agentic work. It is particularly strong at end-to-end software tasks, code review and bug finding, visual analysis...
Full Anthropic: Claude Opus 5 (batch) specs →Qwen3.8 Max 0902 is an updated snapshot of Qwen3.8 Max from Alibaba's Qwen team. It is a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that accepts text, image, and video input and returns text,...
Full Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) specs →