A $2 model ranks second on Code Arena

Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max-0902 was in second place on Arena’s WebDev coding leaderboard on September 3, with a rating of 1688. It is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output. The Anthropic entry in first place rates 1765 and costs $10 and $50.

The listing says Qwen beat Claude Opus 5 max. The ratings come from blind pairwise votes: two anonymous models answer the same prompt, a person picks the better result, and the votes are turned into a Bradley-Terry rating. That is an Elo-style score that only means something relative to the other entries. Every rating has a confidence band, and the board turns those bands into a range of ranks each model could plausibly hold.

Qwen’s range runs from second to fifth. Its 1688 has a band of 18 points either way. The Anthropic entry in third has 1687, plus or minus 8, so Qwen’s lead over it is only one point. Fourth place sits at 1674, plus or minus 11, and fifth at 1669, plus or minus 12. Both of those have a possible range of second to sixth. The leader’s range is first to first: it is 77 points clear, with a band of 23.

Price is where the top five actually differ. The third-place Anthropic model lists $5 input and $25 output, so Qwen gets a practically identical rating for less than a quarter of the output price. The leader’s $50 output rate is more than eight times Qwen’s. Qwen isn’t the only cheap entry near the top: fifth place also lists $2 and $6. Further down the board, Tencent’s entry in ninth rates 1626 at $0.83 and $2.50, and the tenth-place model rates 1622 at $0.16 input and $0.47 output. Anthropic models hold ranks one, three, six and eight.

Qwen3.8-Max, the model line behind the 0902 entry, is a sparse mixture-of-experts model. It has 2.4 trillion parameters, and about 95 billion of them are active for any given token. The previous Max-tier flagship, Qwen3.7-Max, stayed proprietary and never got an open-weight release.

Confidence bands narrow as votes come in. Qwen’s rating rests on 1,472 votes, against 10,583 for the Anthropic entry one point below it and 1,106 for the leader.