Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 Max is a giant new contender in the AI arena

Alibaba has released a preview of Qwen3.8 Max, the latest flagship model from its Qwen AI unit. The company says the model ranks among the strongest systems now available and compares with leading frontier models.

Bloomberg News reports that Alibaba describes Qwen3.8 Max as second only to Anthropic’s Fable 5. The Hangzhou based company makes the preview available to developers through its coding tools, including Qoder.

Alibaba says Qwen3.8 Max has 2.4 trillion parameters. Parameters are internal settings that help an AI model identify patterns and generate responses. A larger count does not automatically mean better results, but the figure signals Alibaba’s effort to compete at the upper end of the AI market.

The company has not disclosed further technical details, such as the model’s training data, benchmarks, cost or limits on use. It says it plans to release the model as open-weight software soon. That approach would let developers download and adapt the model weights, the numerical values learned during training, rather than relying only on Alibaba’s hosted services.

The launch follows a recent release by Chinese startup Moonshot AI. Its Kimi K3 model is reported to have 2.8 trillion parameters and has drawn attention for performance claims that place it alongside systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Alibaba’s announcement also comes as it expands its position in China’s AI ecosystem. The company recently gained approval from Beijing to support Apple Intelligence in China as Apple’s technology partner.