Alibaba, the China-based ecommerce and cloud computing company, released the Qwen3.8-Max model weights for download under a custom license.

The license requires businesses offering model-as-a-service or AI work assistants with more than US$50 million in aggregate revenue over any consecutive 12-month period to obtain a separate commercial license.

The release is Alibaba’s first move from a closed application programming interface model to open weights for a Max model.

Because the license restricts some commercial use, the model does not meet standard open-source definitions.

Alibaba also offers hosted access internationally at US$2 per million input tokens and US$6 per million output tokens, below the US$5/US$30 rate cited for OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

On BenchLM, Qwen3.8-Max is ranked sixth overall among public models and first for reasoning.

🔗 Source: South China Morning Post

Recent Alibaba developments