Alibaba’s Qwen team said on X on 11 November that its next model generation, Qwen4, is on the way. The same day, the team opened a preview of Qwen4-Max. Alibaba’s changelog describes qwen4-max-preview as a multimodal frontier model: it generates text, understands images and video, and reasons before answering. The company is aiming it at programming, office work, front-end development and complex agentic tasks.

The model supports web search, tool calls and structured output. It is compatible with the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.

A 1 million-token context, but no public benchmark results

Citing Alibaba’s documentation, Pandaily and Xenospectrum report a context window of 1 million tokens and a maximum output of 393,216 tokens. The output limit covers both reasoning and the final answer, so long reasoning leaves less room for the answer. Reasoning is on by default, and users can adjust how much the model reasons with the reasoning effort setting.

Xenospectrum said a single request can include up to 64 videos, each up to two hours long and 2 GB in size. The publication notes that the input limit does not guarantee the model will understand a long video or context accurately.

Alibaba has not published benchmark results, a model card, a parameter count, a per-token price or the model weights, Pandaily reported. Nor has the company given a release date for the full Qwen4 generation, and the claims about the model’s capabilities are its own. AIBase earlier reported leaked benchmark figures, but Alibaba has not published them.

Trial ends on 25 November

Through the API, the model is available only with a Token Plan subscription, not on pay-as-you-go billing. Pandaily said the documentation limits the trial to the period from 10:00 on 11 November to midnight on 25 November, Beijing time, which is 18:00 on 25 November Finnish time. The model will not change during the trial and will be retired afterwards.

The sources differ on the discount. Pandaily said Qwen4-Max calls consume Token Plan usage units, or credits, at a promotional rate as low as 20 per cent of the standard rate. AIBase put the price at as low as one-tenth of the original.

A personal Token Plan costs $6–43 a month and includes 20,000–200,000 credits, Xenospectrum reported. It is intended for interactive use, for example in development environments and coding agents. Its terms prohibit bulk processing with automation scripts, permanent backends for your own applications, and batch jobs. A team subscription costs $20–180 per seat per month.

The publication said Token Plan can be bought and used only in Alibaba Cloud’s Singapore region, and its API key and endpoint do not work with the standard pay-as-you-go API.

Users can also try the model in Alibaba’s own services: QwenWork, the Qoder coding tool, the Qwen app and QwenStudio.