Alibaba unveils Qwen3.8-Max AI model with 2.4 trillion parameters

Alibaba unveiled its Qwen3.8-Max artificial intelligence model on Monday, 3 August 2026 (12 Mordad 1405), describing it as the largest and most capable model in its Qwen series to date. Alibaba Cloud said the multimodal model has 2.4 trillion total parameters and supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens.

According to the company, the model uses a sparse mixture of experts architecture and activates only 95 billion of its parameters per operation, cutting computing costs and response times compared with dense models of a similar scale. By total parameter count it is slightly smaller than Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, released in July with 2.8 trillion parameters.

Alibaba said the model ranked fifth on the Text Arena leaderboard, second on Vision Arena and fourth on a coding focused arena. It is available to developers through application programming interfaces on the Model Studio platform, and the company said it will release the model weights next week. CNBC reported that Alibaba shares rallied following the announcement.