Alibaba has unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, the most capable model it has built and a pointed entry in the size race between China’s largest AI developers. At 2.4 trillion parameters it sits just below Moonshot’s Kimi K3, which carries 2.8 trillion, close enough that the comparison is the story.
The model is multimodal, handling text, images, and video, and can take up to a million tokens in a single prompt. Alibaba says it will launch next week through Model Studio, the developer platform on Alibaba Cloud.
On Arena.AI’s public leaderboard, Qwen3.8-Max ranks highest of any Chinese text model and second in the world on the visual-analysis benchmark, behind only Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. It is a step up from the version Alibaba recently billed as the world’s No.2 AI model.
The headline parameter count is not the number that governs cost. Qwen3.8-Max uses a mixture-of-experts design that activates only about 95 billion parameters for any given request, a way of keeping a very large model cheap to run and quick to answer.
A million-token context window matters for the tasks Alibaba is chasing. It is enough to hold a large codebase, a long video transcript, or a stack of documents at once, the raw material for the agent work the company keeps circling back to.
