Alibaba unveils Qwen3.8-Max, its largest open-source AI model

Alibaba ↗ 5.10% released its latest flagship AI model, Qwen3.8-Max, on Monday, featuring 2.4 trillion parameters and claiming performance competitive with leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Hong Kong-listed Alibaba shares jumped sharply in early trading following the announcement.investing

The model represents a return to Alibaba's open-source strategy after the company kept several recent flagship releases proprietary earlier this year. Alibaba said it plans to release the model's weights for public download next week, making Qwen3.8-Max the first Max-class Qwen model to be open-sourced.scmp

What the Model Does

Qwen3.8-Max supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens and uses 95 billion active parameters out of its 2.4 trillion total, according to Alibaba. The model is multimodal, capable of processing lengthy documents, video content, and live streams to build searchable knowledge bases.scmp+1

Alibaba said the model can recreate software applications from screenshots, generate interactive games and educational animations, and convert two-dimensional floor plans into 3D visualizations. The company has positioned Qwen3.8-Max as suited for autonomous coding, complex research, and other long-running agentic tasks.scmp

Benchmark tests showed the model was broadly competitive with leading U.S. models, outperforming them on several coding, multimodal, and engineering benchmarks while trailing on some general-purpose reasoning tests. Bloomberg reported that the model ranks higher on some benchmarks than Moonshot's recently unveiled Kimi K3.investing+1

Intensifying Competition

The launch comes amid an accelerating race among Chinese AI developers including DeepSeek, Moonshot, and ByteDance. Earlier this year, DeepSeek's low-cost reasoning models reshaped the competitive landscape, prompting a wave of rapid model upgrades across the industry.investing

Alibaba has been ramping up AI investment to keep pace. In May, the company said it would exceed its planned AI infrastructure spending of up to 380 billion yuan ($55.96 billion) over three years. The model is available globally through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio APIs and through QwenWork, the company's workplace AI agent platform.scmp+1