Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-Max, claims performance rivaling Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5

Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max, describing it as its largest and most capable AI model to date and claiming performance that rivals systems from U.S. frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as domestic rivals such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. The company said the model is widely available to users and confirmed its release via a blog post published on Monday. Alibaba had previewed the model the previous month, stating at the time that it was “second only to Fable 5,” Anthropic’s flagship model.

Alibaba’s own testing and rankings on the crowdsourced Arena.AI leaderboard indicate Qwen3.8-Max broadly matches—and sometimes exceeds—the performance of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 on benchmark tests. On Arena’s text model leaderboard, Qwen3.8-Max trails only Fable 5 and three models in Anthropic’s Opus family. For frontend coding, it is outperformed only by two Claude Opus models and Kimi K3, and for visual analysis it is surpassed only by Fable 5.

The company states Qwen3.8-Max has 2.4 trillion parameters, a figure widely used as a shorthand for model scale. While parameter counts do not guarantee superior performance, Alibaba notes that Moonshot’s Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters, and most top U.S. labs do not disclose exact counts for their leading systems.

Alibaba announced plans to release the model’s weights next week, describing them as the adjustable numerical values that determine how the model processes information. Open-weight releases grant developers more control than proprietary systems from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and have become a growing point of differentiation for China’s AI industry.

The release marks Alibaba’s return to open-weight model distributions after a brief shift toward proprietary releases earlier in the year. Open-weight releases have been championed by Beijing as a means to expand China’s influence in global AI governance and encourage adoption of domestic AI technologies.

The timing of Qwen3.8-Max’s launch follows closely behind Moonshot AI’s release of Kimi K3 and coincides with the unveiling of new video generation models by ByteDance and MiniMax, reflecting an accelerated pace of AI model releases in China.