Chinese technology giant Alibaba has released Qwen3.8-Max, which it describes as its largest and most capable AI model yet, claiming its performance rivals leading systems from US firms Anthropic and OpenAI as well as domestic competitor Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. The launch, announced in a blog post on Monday, follows a preview last month in which Alibaba said the model was "second only to" Anthropic's flagship Claude Fable 5, and comes as Chinese AI companies increase their pace of releases and appear to be closing the gap with their American rivals.

Alibaba's own benchmark testing suggests Qwen3.8-Max broadly matches, and sometimes exceeds, Claude Fable 5, while on the crowdsourced Arena.AI leaderboard it trails only Fable 5 and three Anthropic Opus models for text, and is beaten solely by two Claude Opus models and Kimi K3 on frontend coding. The model reportedly has 2.4 trillion parameters, fewer than Kimi K3's 2.8 trillion, though such figures are not a reliable measure of capability and most top US labs keep theirs undisclosed. Alibaba says it will release the model's weights next week, marking a return to open-weight releases after briefly favouring proprietary launches for its more advanced models earlier this year, a strategy Beijing has encouraged to widen the global reach of Chinese AI technology.