Alibaba Group has made Qwen 3.8-Max, its next-generation flagship AI model, widely accessible to developers and businesses around the world — the company's largest model to date. The release marks Alibaba's return to open-sourcing its top-tier AI systems after keeping several recent flagships proprietary.
The 2.4-trillion-parameter model is built on a mixture-of-experts architecture and supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens — roughly 750,000 words per query. Alibaba says it can match the best American systems, including leading coding-focused rivals, with strong performance in code generation, reasoning and long-horizon agentic tasks that require using multiple tools autonomously.
The model is available through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio APIs and QwenWork, the company's workplace AI agent platform, which entered public beta on the same day to take on rivals such as Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. Multimodal by design, it can process long documents, video and live streams, rebuild software applications from screenshots and turn 2D floor plans into 3D visualisations.
Investors were quick to respond: Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares rose 7% to close at HK$125.20 on the day of the release. The company says the open-weights release will follow during the week starting August 10 — a first for its top model class.
