Alibaba Unveils Qwen3.8-Max Model—China’s Latest AI Challenger To OpenAI And Anthropic

Aug 03, 2026 09:09 PM - 1 hour ago 1

Topline

Chinese tech elephantine Alibaba connected Monday launched what it called its “most capable” AI exemplary yet, which the tech elephantine claimed tested comparable to aliases amended than Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s ChatGPT amid China’s accelerating AI title pinch the U.S.

The Chinese tech elephantine hailed its exemplary arsenic its “most capable.”

Associated Press

Key Facts

Alibaba introduced its Qwen3.8-Max AI model, scheduled to merchandise adjacent week, arsenic 1 of the world’s largest unfastened AI models astatine 2.4 trillion parameters, aliases the values that style really a exemplary processes information.

The model’s capabilities see real-life work, research, autonomous coding and long-horizon execution, an AI model’s expertise to complete tasks that require galore sequential steps, Alibaba said.

Qwen3.8-Max tin codification for hours without personification input, and successful 1 soul test, Alibaba claimed the exemplary spent 16 days building and improving an AI coding instrumentality by penning code, testing it, fixing errors and past refining its activity connected its own, which Alibaba said showed improved ratio complete time.

Alibaba shared testing results that appeared to show Qwen3.8-Max outperforming Anthropic’s Fable 5 successful multimodal reasoning, ocular supplier and coding, agency intelligence, real-world understanding, and ocular perception, pinch results comparable to aliases higher than OpenAI’s GPT5.6-Sol.

Shares of Alibaba jumped 4.8% soon aft trading opened connected Monday, pursuing a 7% emergence successful Hong Kong-based trading.

surprising fact

Alibaba’s AI exemplary is comparable successful size to Chinese startup Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, which the patient claimed was the largest-ever unfastened AI exemplary astatine 2.8 trillion parameters. Open models, for illustration Kimi K3 aliases Qwen3.8-Max, let developers to download, tally and modify the AI, dissimilar proprietary models for illustration ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, whose underlying systems are private. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has disclosed the full parameter counts of their models.

key background

Ahead of the afloat unveiling of Qwen3.8-Max, Alibaba claimed its AI exemplary would beryllium comparable to different starring AI models and 2nd only to Anthropic’s flagship Fable. The merchandise comes arsenic Chinese AI firms person worked to adjacent the spread pinch their American competitors, contempt U.S. export controls limiting entree to the astir precocious AI chips, including Nvidia’s H200 chips. The U.S. has alleged that Chinese firms person smuggled banned AI chips into China from the U.S. and worked astir export restrictions by buying processors done overseas subsidiaries. Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump management would look into whether Chinese AI models had been distilled from American models, soon aft Moonshot—founded successful 2023 pinch backing from Alibaba—launched its Kimi K3 model, adding the U.S. authorities did not support “IP theft.”