Qwen3 Max by Alibaba is a 1T+ parameter MoE model pretrained on 36T tokens, with Instruct and Thinking variants for coding, agentic tasks, and advanced reasoning.
Capabilities, design details, and architectural traits
Qwen3 Max is Alibaba's largest and most capable language model to date, developed by the Qwen team under Alibaba Cloud. It is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with over 1 trillion parameters, pretrained on approximately 36 trillion tokens — roughly double the pretraining data used for its predecessor, Qwen2.5.
Qwen3 Max ships in two distinct variants with different operational profiles:
qwen3-max) and Qwen Chat.The Instruct variant targets low-latency inference, while the Thinking variant enables longer deliberation traces with explicit tool calls — a documented distinction that shapes how each is deployed in agentic workflows.
Qwen3-Max-Instruct is available via Qwen Chat and through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio using an OpenAI-compatible API. The Thinking variant was in active training at the time of the official announcement and is being prepared for public release.
Independent evaluations · Artificial Analysis
Evaluate specifications, pricing, and independent benchmark indices
| Model Details | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| General Info | |||
| Provider | Alibaba | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Release Date | September 23, 2025 | July 24, 2026 | June 9, 2026 |
| Knowledge Cutoff | Jun 2025 | May 2026 | - |
| Context & Limits | |||
| Context Window | 262K | 1M Best Context Window | 1M Best Context Window |
| Pricing (per 1M tokens) | |||
| Input Pricing | $1.20 Best Input Pricing | $5 | $10 |
| Output Pricing | $6 Best Output Pricing | $25 | $50 |
| Modalities | |||
| Inputs | text | textimage | textimagefile |
| Outputs | text | text | text |
| Benchmarks (0-100) | |||
| Intelligence Index | 24.5 | 63.1 Best Intelligence Index | 62.1 |
| Coding Index | - | 78.0 Best Coding Index | 76.5 |
| Agentic Index | - | 59.2 Best Agentic Index | 56.6 |
Graduate-level reasoning and expert Q&A evaluation.
Extremely difficult logical reasoning and knowledge.
Logical reasoning over long context windows.
Independent evaluation data provided by Artificial Analysis. To view the latest benchmarks and full details, visit their official site.