A New Scale for Qwen
The model represents a major jump in scale for Alibaba’s Qwen series, which released a 1 trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max in September 2025 and a 397-billion-parameter open-weight Qwen3.5 in February 2026. Qwen3.8 more than doubles the parameter count of its predecessor and is described as fully multimodal. Llinkedin
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Alibaba’s Qwen team announced the model on X, stating it would go open-weight “soon” — a departure from the company’s more recent practice of keeping flagship Max models proprietary and API-only. The Qwen3.7-Max model released in May 2026, for instance, was never made available as open weights. Yyottalabs
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Performance Claims Lack Independent Verification
Alibaba claims Qwen3.8’s overall performance ranks just below Anthropic’s Fable 5, but the assertion currently rests entirely on internal evaluations. No independent third-party benchmarks have been published. This mirrors a pattern from previous Qwen releases: when Alibaba launched Qwen3.5 in February, it reported benchmark results comparable to GPT-5.2 and Claude 4.5 Opus, though outlets including CNBC noted those comparisons were self-reported and could not be independently verified. Ccnbc
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The AI model race between Chinese and American labs has intensified throughout 2026, with Alibaba releasing a succession of models — Qwen3.5, Qwen3.5-Max, Qwen3.7-Max, Qwen3-Max-Thinking — each claiming competitiveness with frontier systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Rreuters
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Access and What Comes Next
Developers in mainland China can access Qwen3.8-Max-Preview now through Alibaba’s Token Plan subscription tier. The promise of open weights, if fulfilled, would mark a return to the strategy that made earlier Qwen models among the most widely adopted open-source AI systems globally. Alibaba has not announced a timeline for the full release or provided details on architecture, training data, or context window specifications. Kkucoin
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