Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Claude Haiku 4.5

Anthropic

Claude Haiku 4.5, released by Anthropic in October 2025, is a fast, efficient large language model from the Claude 4.5 family optimized for high-throughput, low-latency workloads. It features a 200K token context window, 64K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking capabilities. Haiku 4.5 targets latency-sensitive applications such as real-time assistants, document classification, and lightweight agentic tasks where rapid response times are a primary requirement.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in February 2026 as the open-weight flagship of the Qwen3.5 series, featuring 17 billion active parameters per forward pass through a hybrid linear-attention and sparse-MoE architecture based on Gated Delta Networks. The model was co-trained on text, images, and video using early fusion, making it natively multimodal across a 262K token context window, while achieving significantly higher inference throughput than comparable dense models due to its sparse computation design. At release it was one of the most capable open-weight models publicly available, offered under Apache 2.0 and accessible through Alibaba's DashScope API as the Qwen3.5-Plus endpoint.