A Qwen Code commit sizes qwen4 at 1M tokens. Its own pull request calls that a guess

The Qwen Code repository merged a commit on 28 October that sizes any model id beginning qwen4 at a 1,000,000-token context window. Four lines in tokenLimits.ts and sixteen in its test. Alibaba has announced no Qwen 4 model.

What the commit does

The /^qwen4/ rule sits beside the existing qwen3.x row and ahead of the 256K fallback, so an id no catalog describes is assumed to hold a million tokens. The commit message explains the bug: the 1M rules stopped at qwen3.x, so every qwen4 spelling fell through to the 256K row and auto-compaction fired at 22% of the real window. Auto-compaction trips at 0.85 of the window: on 256K that is 222,822 tokens, 22% of a million.

The code comment is the careful part: "1M is the forward default for the qwen4 generation, so qwen4.x releases need no further code change. The catalog still wins once models.dev publishes a qwen4 entry with a different window." A test checks that a 400,000-token catalog entry outranks the family row. The pull request is franker: no qwen4 entry exists in models.dev or the bundled catalog, and the value is "reviewer-reported rather than something the code or models.dev can confirm today."

Seven strings, one name

The test asserts 1,000,000 for qwen4, qwen4-max, qwen4-plus, qwen4-coder-plus, qwen4.5-max, qwen4-max-2026-10-01 and openai/qwen4-max. Two are obviously placeholders: a 4.5 minor and a dated snapshot, so the regex needs no further edit.

qwen4-omni-120b-think, the name in the r/LocalLLaMA headline that carried the story (roughly 760 points by 4 November), appears in neither commit's diff. The pull request claims it is "already in use as the session model in the omni fixtures," and a fixture path with a line number would settle it. Until someone posts one, the name is a claim, not a leak.

Ranking the evidence

From weakest to strongest: an id typed into a test, a default in client config, provider-facing documentation, a catalog entry or API listing, then weights and a model card. It occupies the first rung, and the second because it changes what the tool assumes at runtime. A later commit on 31 October reached the third, documenting that qwen4 ids take the same /effort tiers as qwen3.8-max, a ladder that stops at xhigh and clamps a configured max.

Alibaba's Apsara recap from September does not fill rung four. It says Qwen 4 is in training and sets out a 4.5 and 5 roadmap to 5 to 10 trillion parameters. It carries no date.

What would settle it

A models.dev entry with a window that is not a million. A Qwen 4 repository on Hugging Face with a licence. The fixture path for the omni name. Qwen's open-source pledge, a screenshot from two days ago, sits on the same rung: a sentence about models nobody has shipped.