Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-Max and says it rivals top US AI models

In short: Alibaba has released Qwen3.8-Max, a new AI model that it says can compete with leading US systems, and it is making it widely available.

What happened

Alibaba, the Chinese tech company, announced a new AI model called Qwen3.8-Max. The company says it is its largest and most capable model so far. Alibaba shared the news in a blog post on Monday.

Alibaba claims Qwen3.8-Max performs similarly to top models from US companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Last month, Alibaba previewed the model and said it was “second only” to Anthropic’s Fable 5, which is Anthropic’s flagship model.

Alibaba also pointed to results from its own testing and to rankings on Arena.AI, a public, crowdsourced website where people compare how different AI models respond. On Arena.AI’s text leaderboard, Qwen3.8-Max sits behind Fable 5 and a few models in Anthropic’s Opus family. Arena.AI rankings also show it scoring highly in coding and in visual analysis.

Alibaba says Qwen3.8-Max has 2.4 trillion parameters. Parameters are like the many tiny settings inside an AI model (similar to the number of knobs and dials) that it adjusts while learning patterns from data.

Why it matters

More powerful AI models from China are arriving quickly and are being shared more widely. That matters because it can increase competition for AI services people use at work and at home, and it can also add pressure on governments debating safety rules and national tech advantages.

Source: The Verge AI