Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Sonnet 4.5
68
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview)
72
Pick Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 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
+10.1 difference
Coding
+23.1 difference
Knowledge
+9.5 difference
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview)
$3 / $15
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
200K
256K
Pick Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 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) is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 72 to 68. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview)'s sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 65.4 against 55.3. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 50% to 65.4%. Claude Sonnet 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 Sonnet 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 Sonnet 4.5.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 72 to 68. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 50% and 65.4%.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.4 versus 73.9. Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 77.2 versus 54.1. Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
Qwen 3.6 Max (preview) has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 65.4 versus 55.3. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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