Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) vs Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) is the pick when you need file / PDF input, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when you need seed (reproducible sampling).
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 Sonnet 4.5 (batch)
Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$263
$270
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) saves $7.50
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$255
$300
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) saves $45.00
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)
$270
$312
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) saves $42.00
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$165
$196
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) saves $31.00
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$82.50
$106
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) saves $23.50
Capabilities side by side
Capability
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (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.
Price history
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch): price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-08-07.
Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902): price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-06.
Which should you choose?
Choose Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) if…
you need file / PDF input — to accept documents without your own parsing step; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) does not advertise it
you need built-in web search — to answer from live web results; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) does not advertise it
Choose Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) if…
you need seed (reproducible sampling) — to repeat a generation for tests and evals; Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) does not advertise it
you need log-probabilities — to read token confidence for classification and scoring; Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 131K tokens (about 98,300 words) per response
you want the newer model — released 2026-09-03, 11 months after the other
Frequently asked questions
Is Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) better than Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902)?
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) is the pick when you need file / PDF input, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when you need seed (reproducible sampling). In short: Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) when you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when you need seed (reproducible sampling), you need log-probabilities, you generate long outputs in one go, you want the newer model.
Which is cheaper, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) or Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902)?
They cost the same: $3.00 per 1M tokens at a 3:1 input/output mix.
How much do Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) and Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) cost per million tokens?
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) costs $1.50 per 1M input tokens and $7.50 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.
Which has the bigger context window, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) or Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902)?
Both take 1M tokens per request — roughly 1,500 pages of text.
Do Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) and Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) support function calling and JSON output?
Tool calling — Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch): yes, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902): yes. JSON-schema structured output — Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch): yes, Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902): yes.
Can Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) or Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) read images?
Yes, both accept image input.
Is Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) or Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) and Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902)?
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) can write up to 64K tokens (about 48,000 words) per response; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) up to 131K (about 98,300 words).
When were Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) and Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) released?
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.5 (batch) was listed on 2025-09-29; Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max (0902) on 2026-09-03.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic’s most advanced Sonnet model to date, optimized for real-world agents and coding workflows. It delivers state-of-the-art performance on coding benchmarks such as SWE-bench Verified, with...
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,...