Qwen3-Max-Thinking is the flagship reasoning model in the Qwen3 series, designed for high-stakes cognitive tasks that require deep, multi-step reasoning. By significantly scaling model capacity and reinforcement learning compute, it delivers major gains in factual accuracy, complex reasoning, instruction following, alignment with human preferences, and agentic behavior.
Modalities
Input Price
35% off$0.78/M
Output Price
35% off$3.90/M
Context
262K
Weekly Tokens
491M
Released
Feb 9, 2026
Create an API key from your OpenRouter dashboard and set it as an environment variable:
Use qwen/qwen3-max-thinking with the OpenRouter API:
OpenRouter provides an OpenAI-compatible completion API to 400+ models & providers that you can call directly, or using the OpenAI SDK. Additionally, some third-party SDKs are available.
In the examples below, the OpenRouter-specific headers are optional. Setting them allows your app to appear on the OpenRouter leaderboards.
For information about using third-party SDKs and frameworks with OpenRouter, please see our frameworks documentation.
Add "stream": true to your request body to receive responses as server-sent events:
Sends a request for a model response for the given chat conversation. Supports both streaming and non-streaming modes.
https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completionsBearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEYapplication/jsonoptional — your site URL, for rankingsoptional — your site name, for rankingsqwen/qwen3-max-thinkingCreates a streaming or non-streaming response using the OpenAI Responses API format.
Docshttps://openrouter.ai/api/v1/responsesBearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEYapplication/jsonoptional — your site URL, for rankingsoptional — your site name, for rankingsqwen/qwen3-max-thinkingCreates a message using the Anthropic Messages API format. Supports text, images, PDFs, tools, and extended thinking.
Docshttps://openrouter.ai/api/v1/messagesBearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEYapplication/jsonoptional — your site URL, for rankingsoptional — your site name, for rankingsqwen/qwen3-max-thinking| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
reasoning | map | — | Controls reasoning behavior for models that support thinking tokens, including whether reasoning is enabled, the reasoning effort, maximum reasoning tokens, and whether reasoning is excluded from the response. |
max_tokens | integer | — | This sets the upper limit for the number of tokens the model can generate in response. |
temperature | float | 1 | This setting influences the variety in the model's responses. |
top_p | float | 1 | This setting limits the model's choices to a percentage of likely tokens: only the top tokens whose probabilities add up to P. |
seed | integer | — | If specified, the inferencing will sample deterministically, such that repeated requests with the same seed and parameters should return the same result. |
presence_penalty | float | 0 | Adjusts how often the model repeats specific tokens already used in the input. |
response_format | map | — | Forces the model to produce specific output format. |
tools | array | — | Tool calling parameter, following OpenAI's tool calling request shape. |
tool_choice | string or object | — | Controls which (if any) tool is called by the model. |