The Known Good Updated 2 Sep 2026 Subscribe
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ·Anthropic vs Alibaba

Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — head-to-head comparison

Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 profile Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus profile All comparisons
Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 — Anthropic
Quality
#48 of 65
50based on 5 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#331 of 339
7.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#427 of 439
$30.00
Blended per 1M tokens
In $15.00 · Out $75.00
Cache hit price
#316 of 322
$1.50
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#297 of 473
200k
tokens (~300 pages)
Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — Alibaba
Quality
#19 of 65
79based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#228 of 339
35.8
Output tokens per second
Price
#194 of 439
$0.73
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.33 · Out $1.95
Cache hit price
#107 of 322
$0.050
per 1M tokens (−85%)
Context
#113 of 473
1.00M
tokens (~1,500 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 scores 50 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus scores 79 — a 29-point lead for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus. They share 3 published evaluations, with Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 ahead on 1 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus ahead on 2.

Blended pricing is $30.00 per 1M tokens for Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 and $0.73 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus — Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus is about 41.0× cheaper.

Throughput is 8 tokens per second for Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 and 36 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus, with time to first token at 2.7s and 0.9s. Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 accepts 200k tokens of context against 1.00M.

Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 is proprietary; Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus is proprietary. 5 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 3 Sep 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 50 based on 5 of 7 evaluations 79 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $30.00 $0.73
Output tok/s 8 36
Context window 200k 1.00M
Providers 4 1
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Known Good Index 50 79
Coding Index 62 —
Reasoning Index 43 —
Openness Index 5 5
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 · marker = Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond73 / 88
Mock AIME 2024–2540 / 93
SWE-bench Verified73 / 58

Right-hand figures read Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 / Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus. Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 leads on 1 of 3, Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus on 2.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Text Arena 1,418 1,437
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,448 1,444
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Input $/1M $15.00 $0.33
Output $/1M $75.00 $1.95
Blended $/1M $30.00 $0.73
Cache read $/1M $1.500 $0.050
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Context window 200k 1.00M
Max output tokens 32k 66k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.1Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus
Output tokens/s 8 36
Time to first token 2.7s 0.9s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

5 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Anthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 blendedAnthropic: Claude Opus 4.1 tok/s Qwen: Qwen3.6 Plus blendedQwen: Qwen3.6 Plus tok/s
Amazon Bedrock · first party $30.00 11 — —
Google · first party $30.00 3 — —
Anthropic · first party $30.00 — — —
Azure · first party $30.00 — — —
Alibaba · first party — — $0.73 33

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →