Alibaba previews Qwen3.8, claims it’s second only to Claude Fable 5
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. today previewed the most powerful artificial intelligence model in its Qwen family, Qwen3.8, and claimed the system trails only Anthropic PBC’s Claude Fable 5 among the world’s frontier models.
The company revealed the model, offered as a preview build called Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, today at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. It accommodates 2.4 trillion parameters, making it the first Qwen model above 1 trillion parameters to process images, video and documents alongside text.
Alibaba’s Qwen team said in a post on X that the model ranks “second only to Fable 5,” a reference to Anthropic’s recent release. It offered no benchmark scores to support the claim and no independent evaluation has verified the ranking.
That absence stands out. Alibaba’s previous flagship, Qwen3.7-Max, shipped in May with a full set of published results, including a score of 56.6 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The Qwen3.8 preview arrived with no model card, no activated-parameter count and no benchmark data at all.
