Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max open weights are scheduled for public release on August 12, 2026, making it the first 'Max'-series Qwen model to receive open weights. A smaller companion dense model, Qwen3.8-27B, is also planned for the same release. The revenue-share rate Alibaba intends to charge large commercial users of the open-weight version has not been finalized, as negotiations are ongoing.
Qwen3.8-Max launched as a managed API on August 3, 2026. It is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 2.4 trillion stored parameters that activates approximately 95 billion per token. The context window extends to 1 million tokens, with up to 131,072 output tokens per reply and a 262,000-token private thinking budget; it accepts text, image, and video input. API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with cached reads at $0.17 per million.
On benchmarks, the model scores 86.1 on OSWorld-Verified, above GPT-5.6 Sol Max (83.2), Claude Fable 5 (85.0), and Gemini 3.1 Pro (76.2), and 93.0 on PaperBench, which DataCamp describes as the highest reported score on that benchmark. It scores 86.6 on Terminal Bench 2.1, between Claude Opus 4.8 (84.6) and GPT-5.6 Sol (88.8), and 92.6 on GPQA Diamond. Additional scores include $OneMillion-Bench (55.9), HealthBench (60.2), PLawBench (73.2), MRCR v2 256K (92.9), PRBench-Legal (57.6), and PRBench-Finance (58.3). The model outperformed Moonshot's Kimi K3 on several benchmarks.
Alongside the model, Alibaba introduced E-Commerce Bench, a 365-day simulation benchmark built on real, desensitized Taobao and Tmall transaction data covering 12 store types, 60 product categories, nearly 600 suppliers, and 7,000 products, with 152 fraudulent merchants embedded to test risk-control. In autonomous agent evaluations, the model reproduced a research paper's six findings by writing roughly 7,600 lines of code over five days, autonomously built a repository to 265 commits and 127 pull requests over sixteen days, optimized a chip design from 8,298 to 678 logic gates, and grew a simulated trading balance from 100,000 to 416,252 yuan.
Competitor Moonshot's Kimi K3 is larger at 2.8 trillion parameters, released open weights on July 27, and is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Alibaba stock rose 4.5% in New York premarket trading and 7% on the Hong Kong exchange following the Qwen3.8-Max announcement.