Claude Opus 4.6 vs Qwen3-Coder-480B

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.6, released by Anthropic in February 2026, is a large language model from the Claude 4 family designed for complex agent orchestration, extended reasoning, and long-form code generation. It features a 200K token context window (extendable to 1M tokens in beta), 128K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking with both standard and adaptive effort modes. Opus 4.6 targets multi-step agentic workflows, parallel tool use, and applications requiring sustained reasoning over large contexts.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on July 22, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 480 billion total parameters and 35 billion active parameters per inference, specifically designed for agentic coding tasks. It features a 256K token native context window (extendable to 1M tokens with extrapolation) and demonstrated competitive performance on agentic coding, browser automation, and tool-use benchmarks. Qwen3-Coder-480B targets automated software engineering, multi-step code agents, and open-source coding deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.