Qwen3-Max-Preview is the preview release of Alibaba’s Qwen3-Max is now live on OpenRouter

Qwen3-Max-Preview is the preview release of Alibaba’s Qwen3-Max, the flagship model in the Qwen3 series developed by Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team. It’s a massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model with over 1 trillion parameters, designed for advanced reasoning, instruction following, and multimodal tasks. Key features include:

• Improvements over prior versions: Major gains in math, coding, logic, science accuracy; better multilingual support (100+ languages, including strong Chinese/English handling); reduced hallucinations; higher-quality open-ended responses for Q&A, writing, and conversation.
• Optimizations: Excels in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool calling, and long-context understanding (up to 256K tokens, extendable to 1M). It lacks a dedicated “thinking” mode but focuses on efficient, reliable outputs.
• Architecture: Built on Qwen3’s MoE framework, pretrained on trillions of tokens with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). It’s positioned as a high-capacity model for complex, multi-step tasks, competing with top closed-source LLMs like GPT-4 or Claude 3.5.

This preview allows early testing before full release, emphasizing production usability over experimental features.

News: Now Live on OpenRouter

As of September 5, 2025, Qwen3-Max-Preview became available on OpenRouter, a unified API platform for 400+ AI models. Alibaba’s official Qwen account confirmed the launch, highlighting its strengths in reasoning and tool use. OpenRouter integration enables easy access via OpenAI-compatible APIs, with token-based pricing (e.g., tiered by input/output length; specifics vary by provider but start low for previews). Users can route requests through OpenRouter for vendor-agnostic setups, avoiding lock-in.

• Access Details: Available at openrouter.ai/models (search “Qwen3-Max”) or directly via API endpoint. Free tiers may have limits; paid starts at ~$1.60/M input tokens. It’s also accessible via Qwen Chat (interactive UI) and Alibaba Cloud (enterprise IAM).
• Community Buzz: Early X posts praise its potential for coding/programming (e.g., “saves my programmer life?”), with calls for benchmarks. No major issues reported yet, but expect high compute costs due to scale.

This rollout positions Qwen3-Max-Preview as a key player in the open-weight AI race, with full Qwen3 updates (e.g., thinking modes) expected soon.