Alibaba launched Qwen3.8, a large language model with 2.4 trillion parameters, claiming it ranks “second only to Fable 5” in overall performance. A preview version, Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, is available to developers via Alibaba’s Token Plan subscriptions and its coding platforms Qoder and QoderWork. The company expects to release open weights soon.
Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon!🌐
With a massive 2.4T parameters, this model is continuously evolving. We believe it’s one of the most powerful model available today, compatible to leading frontier AI models , second only to Fable 5.
You don't have to wait to… pic.twitter.com/JS3ID73IYS
— Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen) July 19, 2026
Qwen3.8 marks a significant increase in scale for Alibaba’s Qwen series, following the release of the 1 trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max in September 2025 and the 397-billion-parameter open-weight Qwen3.5 in February 2026. The new model more than doubles the parameter count of its predecessor and is fully multimodal.
The Qwen team stated on X that the model would go open-weight “soon,” altering its previous approach of keeping flagship Max models proprietary and API-only. This change follows the release of Qwen3.7-Max in May 2026, which was not made available as open weights.
Alibaba claims Qwen3.8’s performance currently ranks just below Anthropic’s Fable 5 based on internal evaluations, with no independent third-party benchmarks available. This pattern resembles previous Qwen releases where reported performance was not independently verified, such as claims surrounding Qwen3.5’s benchmarks being comparable to GPT-5.2 and Claude 4.5 Opus.
The competition between Chinese and American AI labs has increased throughout 2026, with Alibaba launching several models, including Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.7-Max, emphasizing their competitiveness against systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
Developers in mainland China can access Qwen3.8-Max-Preview through Alibaba’s Token Plan subscription. The anticipated release of open weights could restore the Qwen models’ status as widely adopted open-source AI systems globally. Alibaba has not provided a timeline for the full release, nor details on the model’s architecture, training data, or context window specifications.
