Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Opus 4.5
77
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview)
80
Verified leaderboard positions: Claude Opus 4.5 #9 · Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) unranked
Pick Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Opus 4.5 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Agentic
+2.9 difference
Coding
+11.8 difference
Knowledge
+7.7 difference
Claude Opus 4.5
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview)
$5 / $25
N/A
46 t/s
N/A
1.01s
N/A
200K
256K
Pick Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Opus 4.5 only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) has the cleaner provisional overall profile here, landing at 80 versus 77. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview)'s sharpest advantage is in knowledge, where it averages 73.9 against 66.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 59.3% to 65.4%. Claude Opus 4.5 does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Opus 4.5 is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude Opus 4.5.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 80 to 77. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 59.3% and 65.4%.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 73.9 versus 66.2. Inside this category, SuperGPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Opus 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 65.9 versus 54.1. Inside this category, NL2Repo is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 65.4 versus 62.5. Inside this category, QwenClawBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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