Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max: New AI Rivals US Supremacy

Alibaba has released its largest and "most capable AI model to date," called Qwen3.8-Max. The company claims its performance rivals top systems from US labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. What's interesting is Alibaba says this new model is widely available to users. It was previewed last month, with Alibaba claiming it was "second only to Fable 5," Anthropic’s flagship model. Alibaba's own testing and rankings on Arena.AI suggest the model is as powerful as claimed, sometimes matching or exceeding Fable 5 on benchmark tests. Qwen3.8-Max has 2.4 trillion parameters. Alibaba will also release the weights for Qwen3.8-Max next week, allowing developers more control. This move marks a return to open-weight releases for Alibaba. This development intensifies the global competition in artificial intelligence.