Alibaba opens a preview of its flagship Qwen4-Max model

Alibaba opened early access to Qwen4-Max on November 11, giving users their first chance to try the flagship of its new Qwen4 family.

What Qwen4-Max can do

Alibaba first disclosed that it was training Qwen4 at its Apsara conference in September. It’s positioning Max as the family’s top model for complex coding, interface design and tasks that require an AI agent to use tools across multiple steps.

Qwen4-Max Preview accepts text, images and video and has a 1 million-token context window for working with large codebases or long documents. In August, Alibaba described Qwen3.8-Flash-Next as an early look at the architecture behind Qwen4. That model supported 262,144 tokens by default, with an option to extend its context to 1 million.

QwenCloud specifies that reasoning is on by default at xhigh, the highest of three effort settings. Developers can dial it down to medium or low. Reasoning and the final answer share a 393,216-token output budget, so a model that spends more tokens working through a problem has fewer left for the answer.

The preview supports OpenAI’s Chat Completions and Responses APIs and Anthropic’s Messages API. For developers using Chat Completions, both max_tokens and max_completion_tokens cap reasoning and answer tokens together. A limit previously set for the answer alone can cut a response short.

In an early six-task test, AI Product Sniper scored Qwen4-Max Preview 52 out of 60, compared with 55 for Claude Opus 5.5 and 49 for Gemini 4 Carbon. The tasks ranged from following detailed writing instructions to building browser interfaces. Qwen earned full marks for a browser-based desktop with a playable space shooter. The reviewer ran Qwen in Qoder and Claude in Pi.

Where to try Qwen4-Max

Early access is available in the Qwen app, QwenWork, Qoder and QwenStudio. API access requires a QwenCloud Token Plan subscription and runs through November 25, Beijing time. QwenCloud lists its Lite plan at $6 a month, with a limited-time $3 monthly offer for new users.