Qwen 3.7 Max is Alibaba’s most powerful model. But how does it compare with other flagship models in 2026? Should you choose it over Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5 or Gemini 3.5 Flash?
In this article, we will break down the new release and look at how Qwen 3.7 Max compares with other models, to help you decide when to use it for the best outcome.
Qwen 3.7 Max is already available on Overchat AI, so you can start chatting with it today.
Qwen 3.7 Max is Alibaba's flagship model. It is a proprietary, closed-weight reasoning model that builds on the Qwen 3.6 series.
Qwen 3.7 Max is a reasoning model, meaning it generates an internal chain of thought before producing a final answer.
This extended-thinking approach is standard across frontier models, but Alibaba has optimised it for continuous operation. As a result, Qwen 3.6 can work independently for over 35 hours without interruption. This refers to agentic tasks, not answering a simple question, of course.
In practice, Qwen 3.7 excels at coding and boasts highly accurate long-context retrieval. Most notably, it can solve complex tasks with ease. For instance, Alibaba has confirmed that it can work with over 1,000 tools in a single prompt execution.
Alongside Qwen 3.7 Max, Alibaba also previewed Qwen 3.7 Plus — a multimodal sibling we'll cover below.
Now that we have a general understanding of the model, let’s take a closer look at some of its most important features.
The context window of Qwen 3.7 Max increased by around 4x to 1 million tokens, up from 256K for Qwen 3.6 Max. This is the same size as the context window of Claude Opus 4.7, and in practice, it means that the model rarely runs into issues with limited context, even across very long tasks spanning multiple hours. It is also worth noting that the model supports a maximum output of 65,536 tokens per response.
Alibaba reports that the model can work independently for over 35 hours at a time, managing more than 1,000 tool calls while retaining high performance. This is impressive, given that the performance of most models tends to degrade the longer they work on a task. In practice, this translates to much faster execution and a reduced token burn rate. In one internal test, Alibaba measured a speed improvement of around 10x over the previous version.
If you’re a Claude Code user, you’ll be pleased to learn that Qwen 3.7 Max natively supports the Anthropic API, meaning you can use it with Claude Code straight away. Alibaba also reports that it works very well with OpenClaw.
GPT 3.7 Max supports prompt caching, which is a mechanism where the model can remember — or cache — prompts that are reused multiple times, and this drastically reduces the cost of use. Cached input tokens cost $0.25 per million, which translates to a 90% discount versus the standard $2.50 input rate.
Alongside Max, Alibaba also released Qwen 3.7 Plus, which brings the ability to understand images to the table. Plus ranked #16 globally for Vision on LM Arena, so it’s not the best in class, but decent.
In this section, we will examine the benchmarks for the Qwen 3.7 Max version specifically, since this is the version available on Overchat AI. We will also explain what each benchmark means and how to interpret it.
To start, Qwen 3.7 Max posts a score of 56.6 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.0 benchmark (measuring the overall performance), and this is the highest placement for a Chinese model at the time of release.
You can see the comprehensive benchmark table below, and later we’ll compare these numbers against other models in the same weight class.
Claude Opus 4.7 is Anthropic's flagship, and widely considered one of the best coding models — does the new Chinese AI model beat it?
As you can see, Opus 4.7 performs better than Qwen 3.7 Max on every coding and reasoning benchmark in this set. However, it's important to keep in mind that Qwen 3.7 Max is much cheaper in terms of both input and output, and the difference in performance is not nearly as dramatic as the difference in cost.
GPT-5.5 is currently one of the best coding models. But there is one test in which Qwen 3.7 Max outperforms GPT 5.5.
That’s SWE-Bench Pro, and this is interesting because it is a coding benchmark comprising a handpicked set of realistic coding tasks. This indicates excellent real-world performance.
The DeepSeek V4 Pro is another Chinese AI model. At first glance, it has some similarities with other models, for example, both are 1M-context reasoning models. But here’s how they compare:
To put the above numbers into perspective, bear in mind that the DeepSeek V4 Pro is around six times cheaper.
The two models essentially tie on the SWE-Bench verified coding benchmark, but the Qwen 3.7 Max takes a clear lead on the SWE-Bench Pro (meaning it performs better on harder coding questions) and the GPQA Diamond. The latter involves the model solving problems that have been handpicked by PhD-level researchers in biology, physics and chemistry. These problems are specifically designed so that the model cannot simply Google the answer but has to solve them.
Kimi K2.6 is another AI model from China, specifically from Moonshot AI. It is renowned for its high-quality creative writing and front-end design skills, as well as its ability to deploy many sub-agents for complex tasks through Agent Swarms. But how does it compare to Qwen 3.7?
Qwen 3.7 Max wins on every benchmark in this set, but just barely — within 3 points on most of them.
The Kimi K2.6 is also roughly a third of the price and is open-weight. The biggest difference emerges when it comes to harder reasoning tasks, where Qwen 3.7 Max pulls ahead.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google's new model, and it’s very interesting because Google designed it to be simultaneously fast, cheap, and extremely powerful. It matches flagship level performance at 4x the speed, and even beats Gemini 3.1 Pro on most benchmarks.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is the only model on this list priced near Qwen 3.7 Max. Qwen 3.7 Max leads on SWE-Bench Pro and Intelligence Index, but Gemini 3.5 Flash runs roughly 4x faster on output tokens per second and ships natively with multimodal support.
Here’s how much Qwen 3.7 usage will cost you if you plan to deploy it via the API, per one million tokens:
To put that into perspective, compared to Claude Opus 4.7, for example, Qwen 3.7 Max is roughly half the price on input and less than a third on output. Compared to GPT-5.5, the gap is even wider.
There is one caveat: Qwen 3.7 Max is a reasoning model that thinks heavily before answering. In Artificial Analysis testing, the model generated about 97 million tokens to complete the Intelligence Index evaluation — roughly 4x the 24 million-token average for other models on the benchmark, so usage will be more expensive than flat token prices suggest.
To offset the per-task cost, Qwen 3.7 Max supports prompt caching at $0.25 per million tokens — a 90% discount on cached input. For workloads that re-use long system prompts or reference documents across turns, that drops the effective input cost dramatically.
Or, if you want to skip the API math entirely, you can chat with Qwen 3.7 Max on Overchat AI as part of a single subscription that also includes Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Kimi K2.6, and more.
There are two limitations worth knowing about before you choose Qwen 3.7 models.
Qwen 3.7 Max is text-only. Qwen 3.7 Max does not handle image or audio input. For multimodal workloads, you need to switch to Qwen 3.7 Plus.
Somewhat high abstention rate for a frontier model. This means that when the model is unsure about something, instead of hallucinating an answer, it will stop from doing the task, which lowers the overall accuracy because sometimes the model refuses to continue.
To explain further, Qwen 3.7 Max's hallucination rate on the AA-Omniscience benchmark dropped 21.3 percentage points compared to Qwen 3.6 Max, which is good. But raw accuracy on the same benchmark also dropped 7.6 points, and the model's attempt rate fell from 67.3% to 48.0%. In real life, you’ll get answers like "I don't know" more often than with other models, and it will refuse to answer some edge cases where other AI will at least try. Whether this will impact you materially is very hard to say until you try working with it.
Reach for Qwen 3.7 Max when:
Reach for something else when:
Qwen 3.7 Max was formally announced on May 20, 2026 at the Alibaba Cloud Summit in Hangzhou. The preview version first appeared on the LM Arena leaderboard around May 14, and API access opened on May 19.
API pricing is $2.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, with cached input dropping to $0.25 per million. That makes Qwen 3.7 Max roughly half the price of Claude Opus 4.7 on input and less than a third on output.
No. Qwen 3.7 Max is proprietary and closed-weight, available only through partner platforms like Overchat AI, and Alibaba Cloud Model Studio.
Qwen 3.7 Max is a more powerful reasoning model of the two, but it is text-only. Qwen 3.7 can also understand images and videos, and it’s designed to balance power and speed, better suited to everyday tasks like chatting.
GPT-5.5 is a better model for most tasks, although it is also twice as expensive per token. For example, in the SWE-Bench Verified test, which measures coding performance, GPT-5.5 scores 88.7%, while Qwen-3.7 Max scores 80.4%. This percentage shows how many coding tasks the model was able to solve. GPT-5.5 typically outperforms Qwen 3.7 Max on almost all benchmarks, except for SWE-Bench Pro, where Qwen 3.7 Max slightly outperforms GPT-5.5 with 60.6% vs 58.6% of tasks solved. SWE-Bench Pro is a collection of very challenging coding tasks.
Qwen 3.7 Max is Alibaba's state-of-the-art reasoning model, which, upon its release, became the highest-ranked Chinese model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. While it doesn’t outperform western flagships on most tasks, it comes very close to the performance levels of Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, while costing half to a quarter as much. It also adds a 1M context window, sharper reasoning and native Claude Code compatibility.
To test Qwen 3.7 Max on your own workflows today, head to Overchat AI and start chatting with Qwen 3.7 Max.
