Alibaba previews Qwen 3.6 Max, its most powerful AI

Alibaba released Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview on Monday as an early preview. The model is hosted and proprietary with no open weights. It is available through Qwen Studio and the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API under the identifier qwen3.6-max-preview.

Alibaba’s blog posted benchmark results showing the model ranked first on several coding and agent tests, including SWE-bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0, SkillsBench, QwenClawBench, QwenWebBench and SciCode. The blog reported a 2.3% gain on SuperGPQA and a 5.3% gain on QwenChineseBench compared with Qwen 3.6-Plus. Instruction-following performance measured by ToolcallFormatIFBench placed the model ahead of Claude in those evaluations.

Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview supports a 256,000-token context window and handles text only at launch; it does not accept image inputs. Alibaba wrote that the model improves agentic coding capabilities, world knowledge and instruction following over Qwen 3.6-Plus. The model’s API is compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic specifications to allow integration with existing developer pipelines.

The release includes a preserve_thinking feature that carries reasoning traces across multi-turn conversations. Alibaba recommended the feature for agentic tasks where continuity of context matters.

The Qwen family now includes Max-Preview, Qwen Plus for balanced workloads, Flash for speed, and an open-sourced Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B that activates only 3 billion parameters per inference to reduce compute for local runs. Alibaba released the open-source 35B variant three days before the Max preview.

Independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis ranked Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview second behind Muse Spark and above the median of comparable reasoning models in its price tier. Alibaba described the release as a work in progress and said it expects further improvements. In its announcement Alibaba wrote, “Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview is the most powerful model the company has shipped so far.”

The release follows changes in the Chinese open-model landscape: Alibaba closed the free tier of Qwen Code days after another developer revised its open-source license to restrict commercial use. Lower-end Qwen models remain open source while Max-Preview is offered as a hosted, paid product.