Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs Qwen3-Max

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Anthropic

Claude 3.5 Sonnet, updated by Anthropic in October 2024 (originally released June 2024), is a large language model from the Claude 3.5 family that delivered strong performance in coding, reasoning, and instruction-following at its release. It supports a 200K token context window, 8K maximum output tokens, and native image understanding including screenshot analysis and document comprehension. Claude 3.5 Sonnet targets general-purpose development tasks, document analysis, and applications requiring reliable instruction following with visual input support.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-Max, released by Alibaba in September 2025 as an API preview, is a large language model exceeding one trillion parameters built for complex reasoning and long-context tasks. It features a 262K token context window, hybrid thinking modes that allow switching between direct generation and extended chain-of-thought, and is available as a proprietary cloud API via Alibaba Cloud and Qwen Chat. Qwen3-Max targets demanding reasoning, multilingual analysis, and applications requiring frontier-level performance from the Qwen3 generation.