qwen3.5-397b-a17b

qwen3.5-397b-a17b is a frontier-tier language model from Alibaba Cloud with 397B parameters. qwen3.5-397b-a17b is an open-weights model, meaning the weights are publicly available for self-hosting, fine-tuning, and deployment on your own infrastructure — not just through Alibaba Cloud's API. Qwen is Alibaba's open-weights model family, with strong multilingual performance (especially Chinese/English) and a wide parameter range from 0.5B to 72B.

qwen3.5-397b-a17b is priced at $0.6/1M input tokens and $3.6/1M output tokens. Output tokens are 6× more expensive than input tokens — this ratio reflects the sequential nature of autoregressive generation, which requires a separate forward pass per output token versus parallel processing of all input tokens simultaneously. At a typical usage pattern of 1,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens per call, qwen3.5-397b-a17b costs approximately $2.40 per 1,000 API calls. Alibaba Cloud does not publish a prompt caching rate for this model, so repeated long contexts are billed at the standard $0.6/1M input rate.

Its 262K-token context window is in the top tier for production models, enabling full-document analysis, long multi-turn conversations, and large codebase understanding without chunking. Median latency (P50 time-to-first-token) is approximately 600ms — suitable for interactive applications where sub-second response is acceptable. Throughput is approximately 100 tokens/second — adequate for streaming at comfortable reading speed. Maximum output length is 33K tokens — sufficient for long-form content generation, detailed code files, and extended reports.

qwen3.5-397b-a17b is best suited to chat, coding, vision. Supported capabilities include vision inputs (images alongside text), function calling / tool use for agentic workflows, streaming token output for real-time UIs. Vision support enables document analysis, screenshot understanding, diagram interpretation, and visual question answering — images are converted to tokens at the standard input rate based on resolution. Function calling support makes it suitable for building AI agents, structured data extraction pipelines, and any workflow requiring the model to invoke external APIs or return typed JSON. When evaluating this model for a specific workload, the most important factors are: context window (does your input fit?), output price (how long are your generations?), and latency (is this interactive or batch?). The pricing table above shows how qwen3.5-397b-a17b compares to similar models across these dimensions.

qwen3.5-397b-a17b sits in the frontier tier — the highest-capability models available, used when quality is the primary constraint and cost is secondary. As an open-weights model, qwen3.5-397b-a17b can be self-hosted on GPU compute (see the GPU rental comparison on this site) to eliminate per-token API costs entirely — the break-even point versus API pricing depends on your volume and the GPU hourly rate. When comparing qwen3.5-397b-a17b to alternatives, use the similar models section on this page to find models at comparable price points with different capability tradeoffs. The intelligence score (88/100) reflects aggregate benchmark performance — a useful proxy for general capability, though real-world performance varies significantly by task type. Always test with your specific prompts and use case before committing to a model for production.