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DeepSeek-V3 vs Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview)

Verdict

Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview) leads 4–0 across 4 shared benchmarks.

DeepSeek-V3 0 · Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview) 4 · higher isn't always better — see caveats.

Per-benchmark head-to-head

Reported scores — protocols may differ. How we compare

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DeepSeek-V3Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview)

Capabilities

Math

Math: Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview) leads 2–0 across 2 shared math benchmarks (largest gap: OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025, 91.1 vs 15.75 — single evaluator).

4 reproduced

Reasoning

Reasoning: Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview) leads 2–0 across 2 shared reasoning benchmarks (largest gap: SimpleBench, 55.6 vs 2.68 — single evaluator).

2 reproduced2 unverified

What the labs claim

Vendor claims — compare against the measured scores above. A claim is what a developer says about its own model, not an independent measurement.

DeepSeek-V3

Coding

  • “DeepSeek-V3 achieves the best performance on most benchmarks, especially on math and code tasks.”
    github.com2024

General

  • “At an economical cost of only 2.664M H800 GPU hours, we complete the pre-training of DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8T tokens, producing the currently strongest open-source base model.”
    github.com2024
  • “DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models.”
    github.com2024

Reasoning

  • “Our pipeline elegantly incorporates the verification and reflection patterns of R1 into DeepSeek-V3 and notably improves its reasoning performance.”
    github.com2024

Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview)

Agentic / Tool Use

  • “Compared to Qwen3.6-Plus, this preview release brings stronger world knowledge and instruction following, along with significant agentic coding improvements across a wide range of benchmarks.”
    qwen.ai2026
  • “improved real-world agent and knowledge reliability performance”
    qwen.ai2026

Coding

  • “It achieves the top score on six major coding benchmarks - SWE-bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0, SkillsBench, QwenClawBench, QwenWebBench, and SciCode - with substantial gains over its predecessor”
    qwen.ai2026
A higher number is not always a better model. Each score is task performance under a disclosed harness. Of the 8 measurements across 4 shared benchmarks, 8 single-evaluator or undisclosed-protocol reports; 75% are independently reproduced. Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview) pricing is cross-check disputed — weigh cost claims with the same caution as benchmark wins. Follow any benchmark to its integrity grade before reading a win as decisive.

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