Alibaba unveils Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters, plans open-weight release next week
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Alibaba's Qwen team has unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter AI model that autonomously completed complex tasks such as building software and reproducing research papers over multiple days. The company plans to release the model's weights publicly next week, marking the first open-weight release in the flagship Max class. Alibaba claims the model's performance rivals top systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as domestic competitor Kimi K3.
Autonomous Task Execution
In three case studies, Qwen3.8-Max worked without human intervention. Over 16 days, it built the command-line tool oh-my-cli, generating 265 commits and 127 pull requests. For a research reproduction task, it spent approximately 125 compute hours over five days, producing 7,600 lines of code and running 33 GPU training jobs; it replicated six results from the paper “Unified Data Selection for LLM Reasoning,” then beat its method on the AIME24 math benchmark by 2.7 points through self-devised experiments. In an e-commerce challenge with 526 human teams, the model fine-tuned multiple models and achieved 0.853 accuracy across 45 submissions within 24 hours.
Model Architecture and Release
Qwen3.8-Max scales to 2.4 trillion total parameters with 95 billion active per query, built on the Qwen3.5 architecture. A preview version has been available since mid-July via Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork at 10% of the standard price. Alibaba now says it will release the model’s weights next week, the first open-weight model in the Qwen-Max class. Internal benchmarks place the model just behind Fable 5, according to the team, while Alibaba asserts its performance is on par with frontier systems from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Competitive Position
Alibaba positions Qwen3.8-Max as a challenge to US AI supremacy, claiming it competes with Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s best, as well as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. The Verge reported that Alibaba is making the model widely available to users, intensifying the global AI race. The model’s ability to autonomously handle week-long tasks differentiates it from typical language models, which are often limited to single-turn interactions.
What's Next
The open-weight release is scheduled for next week, with no exact date specified. It remains to be seen whether the model’s autonomous agent capabilities will gain traction among developers and businesses, and how Western competitors will respond.
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Alibaba unveils Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters, plans open-weight release next week
