Alibaba's Qwen team announced on November 11 that Qwen4-Max — the first preview model from its next flagship Qwen4 family — is available on Alibaba's Token Plan under the model ID qwen4-max-preview, with early access also on QwenWork, Qoder, the Qwen app and QwenStudio. The Token Plan preview is time-limited, running until November 25 Beijing time, with subscription tiers for new users starting at $3 a month and a time-limited credit discount.

That is nearly all Alibaba has actually published. There is no model card, no benchmarks, no parameter count, no per-token price and no announcement about open weights. Alibaba says the model improves on Qwen3.8 in areas such as world knowledge, code generation and sustained long tasks, but every figure circulating today — including a one-million-token context figure traced to a merged Qwen Code pull request — is provisional until Alibaba documents it.

The wider family is not out: an October 29 Apsara Conference presentation listed Qwen4-Max, Qwen4-Flash, Qwen4-Plus and a 27B local model as forthcoming, and only Max has reached preview. This is a preview of a major lab's next generation, not a general release — the specs, and whether US labs react to it, are the story to watch.