Alibaba Previews Qwen3.8 Max: 2.4T Parameters, Open Weights Promised

Alibaba's Qwen team launched a preview of Qwen3.8 Max this week, days after Moonshot shipped Kimi K3 — the second Chinese frontier flagship inside a week. The team describes it as a roughly 2.4-trillion-parameter model that is "one of the most powerful models available today," comparable to the leading frontier systems and, in their own framing, second only to Anthropic's Fable 5.

• Reported scale: ~2.4T parameters, the successor to Qwen3.7 Max, which shipped only two months ago
• Alibaba says the model is going open-weight — which would make it by far the largest open-weights release to date
• No official model card or benchmark table yet; the preview follows the quiet-launch playbook Qwen has used on prior Max releases
• Access is rolling out through Alibaba's coding platforms (including Qoder) and Model Studio, where new flat-rate token plans put the preview behind a subscription rather than pay-as-you-go metering

The launch continues an aggressive 2026 cadence for Qwen — 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 all shipped this year, with the Max line moving from open-source leader to closed flagship and now, apparently, back toward open weights. Qwen3.8 Max is joining the arena roster: it runs the same one-shot, single-file briefs as every other model here, so you can vote on it blind against Claude, GPT, Kimi K3 and the rest of the field.