What is Qwen 4?
Qwen 4 is Alibaba’s forthcoming next-generation foundation model and the planned successor to the company’s Qwen3.x model family. Alibaba announced Qwen 4 at the 2026 Apsara Conference on September 22 and confirmed that the model is currently in training. The company has not yet disclosed Qwen 4’s architecture, parameter count, context length, training-compute requirements, benchmark scores, pricing, licensing terms, or release schedule. Qwen 4 is being developed as Alibaba expands its broader AI stack across foundation models, multimodal systems, AI infrastructure, and agent-oriented cloud services. A major research direction surrounding Alibaba’s next generation of models is recursive self-improvement based on real-world tasks and empirical feedback. The company has already experimented with this approach using Qwen3.8-Max, allowing the model to participate in automated pipeline design, data validation, experimentation, error diagnosis, and post-training optimization. Alibaba reported that Qwen3.8-Max completed 33 iterative cycles during one such experiment and increased its Artificial Analysis score from 40 to 45. In a separate chip-design experiment, a Qwen model performed more than 10,000 EDA tool calls during over 60 hours of automated improvement work, illustrating Alibaba’s interest in long-horizon agentic tasks. These demonstrations describe the research program surrounding future Qwen development rather than confirmed features of Qwen 4 itself. Alibaba has also announced a longer-term roadmap in which Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 models are projected to reach between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters. Qwen 4 therefore remains a pre-release model, with detailed capabilities and access information expected to become clearer when Alibaba publishes its formal launch materials.