Alibaba’s AI model Qwen3.8-Max made widely accessible ahead of open-weights release
Flagship 2.4 trillion parameter model highlights native multimodal capabilities and the ability to carry out long-horizon agentic tasks
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Wency Chenin ShanghaiPublished: 11:01am, 3 Aug 2026Alibaba Group Holding has made its next-generation flagship artificial intelligence (AI) model Qwen3.8-Max widely accessible to global users ahead of an open-weights release next week.The move marks Alibaba’s return to open-sourcing its top-tier AI models after keeping several recent flagship releases proprietary earlier this year. It also signals the firm’s entry into a recent round of powerful releases by Chinese developers aggressively narrowing the gap with leading US labs.The massive 2.4-trillion-parameter model supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens and is available to global developers via Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as through QwenWork, the company’s workplace AI agent platform, Alibaba announced on Monday.
A multimodal foundation model, Qwen3.8-Max can process various types of data from lengthy documents to television series and live streams to build searchable knowledge bases, according to Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post.
The company also said the model could recreate software applications from screenshots, generate interactive games and educational animations, and convert two-dimensional floor plans into 3D visualisations.
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Alibaba has positioned Qwen3.8-Max as particularly suited for autonomous coding, complex research and other long-running tasks.
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