IBL News | New York
Chinese company Qwen presented its latest flagship reasoning model, Max-Thinking, this month.
“Qwen3-Max-Thinking achieves significant performance improvements across multiple dimensions, including factual knowledge, complex reasoning, instruction following, alignment with human preferences, and agent capabilities,” said the company.
Qwen ensured that on “19 established benchmarks, Qwen3-Max-Thinking demonstrated performance comparable to leading models such as GPT-5.2-Thinking, Claude-Opus-4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro.
The new model includes two key innovations: an adaptive tool that leverages capabilities for on-demand retrieval and code interpreter invocation, and advanced test-time scaling techniques that significantly boost reasoning performance, “surpassing Gemini 3 Pro on key benchmarks.”
The adaptive tool is available at the free version of chat.qwen.ai.
Meanwhile, the API for Qwen3-Max-Thinking (model name qwen3-max-2026-01-23) is available to the public. Developers can first register an Alibaba Cloud account and activate the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio service, and then navigate to the console and create an API key.
The Qwen APIs are also compatible with the Anthropic API protocol, enabling Qwen3-Max-Thinking to work seamlessly with Claude Code.