# China AI race

Alibaba’s Qwen3‑Max‑Thinking: China’s Latest Push to Match Western ‘Thinking’ Models

Alibaba has launched Qwen3‑Max‑Thinking, a flagship inference model its team says matches top Western 'thinking' models on key benchmarks. The model emphasizes reasoning, instruction following and agent capabilities and is aimed at commercial integration across Alibaba's cloud and services. The announcement underscores China’s accelerating push to develop indigenous, production‑ready large language models, though benchmark claims require independent validation.