Claude Opus 4.1 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Claude Opus 4.1

Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.1, released by Anthropic in August 2025, is a large language model from the Claude 4 family optimized for demanding reasoning, multi-step coding, and extended analysis tasks. It features a 200K token context window, 32K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking capabilities. Opus 4.1 targets complex problem-solving, multi-turn reasoning workflows, and applications requiring deep analysis with integrated tool use.

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.