Qwen 3.6 Plus Free Preview: 1M Context, Beats Claude 4.5 Opus on Terminal-Bench 2.0 at 3x Speed

paddo.dev·medium signal

Qwen 3.6 Plus launched as a free preview on OpenRouter (model ID: qwen/qwen3.6-plus-preview:free) with 1M context window, 65K output tokens, native function calling, and always-on chain-of-thought. Scores 61.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.0 vs Claude 4.5 Opus at 59.3, and 78.8 on SWE-bench Verified vs Opus 4.6 at 80.9 — at roughly 3x the speed. Real-world testing on a codebase found 19 issues (7 actionable, 7 nits, 5 false positives). Free tier expired ~April 3.