Alibaba Ships Qwen3.8-Max at 2.4 Trillion Parameters and Promises the Weights Next Week

Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max on August 3 through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio. It is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with 2.4 trillion total parameters and about 95 billion active per token, a one-million-token context window, and text, image and video input. The company says it will publish the weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope next week, which would make it the first Max-tier Qwen available for download.

The benchmark table comes from Alibaba. On PaperBench, which tests reproduction of research papers, Qwen3.8-Max reports 93.0 against 90.5 for GPT-5.6 Sol, 88.8 for Claude Fable 5 and 80.3 for Opus 4.8. On IFBench it reports 82.8 against 72.7 for the nearest competitor. On Alibaba's run of Terminal Bench 2.1 it reports 86.6, second to GPT-5.6 Sol at 88.8. The longer-horizon claims warrant more caution: a 16-day autonomous coding run and a chip-design flow of more than 500 steps that Alibaba says cut die area by 81 percent. None of that has been reproduced outside the company.

Pricing requires no leaderboard to verify. Application programming interface (API) access runs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, against $10 and $50 for Anthropic's Fable 5. A small independent test posted by the Atomic Chat team compared three interactive three-dimensional physics scenes generated by each model and put Qwen ahead at roughly one-seventh the cost. Alibaba's own launch video leads with chip design and biology, which Russian-language coverage read as a deliberate reply to United States export restrictions on semiconductors.