Alibaba has made Qwen3.8-Max, its flagship AI model, available globally through Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio application programming interfaces and QwenWork.

The launch comes ahead of a planned open-weights release next week as Chinese developers push further into coding agents and multimodal systems.

The 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal model has a 1-million-token context window.

Alibaba said it is designed for long-running agentic tasks and activates 95 billion parameters during inference.

Alibaba also said Qwen3.8-Max ranked fifth on Text Arena and second on Vision Arena, which ranks multimodal models through head-to-head battles with bootstrapped confidence intervals.

The Qwen family had nearly 1 billion cumulative downloads and more than 50% of global open-source AI downloads by early 2026, according to a report.

Alibaba Cloud has not listed standalone per-token pricing for Qwen3.8-Max on Model Studio, though a preview is included in its AI Token Plan.

The release follows Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, a multimodal model with 2.8 trillion parameters and a 1-million-token context window.

🔗 Source: South China Morning Post

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