# Alibaba releases Qwen 3.8-Max 2.4T parameter model with 1M token context

> Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen 3.8-Max, a flagship model it says rivals the best Western systems on benchmarks. The headline specs are large: 2.4 trillion total parameters with about 95 billion active at a time thanks to a sparse mixture-of-experts design, a 1-million-token context window, and native handling of text, images, and video. Alibaba released it on August 3 alongside a smaller 27-billion-parameter variant. What is notable is not just the size but the openness. This is the first time Qwen has open-sourced a Max-class model, putting frontier-scale weights into the hands of anyone on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Alibaba says the model ranks as the top Chinese system for text on the Arena.AI leaderboard and second globally on vision tasks. Benchmark claims from any lab deserve scrutiny, but the broader signal is hard to miss: China's open models keep closing the gap with US labs, and the willingness to release weights openly is becoming a real competitive lever, not just a research courtesy.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Bloomberg · Published Sunday, August 16, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen 3.8-Max, a flagship model it says rivals the best Western systems on benchmarks. The headline specs are large: 2.4 trillion total parameters with about 95 billion active at a time thanks to a sparse mixture-of-experts design, a 1-million-token context window, and native handling of text, images, and video. Alibaba released it on August 3 alongside a smaller 27-billion-parameter variant. What is notable is not just the size but the openness. This is the first time Qwen has open-sourced a Max-class model, putting frontier-scale weights into the hands of anyone on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Alibaba says the model ranks as the top Chinese system for text on the Arena.AI leaderboard and second globally on vision tasks. Benchmark claims from any lab deserve scrutiny, but the broader signal is hard to miss: China's open models keep closing the gap with US labs, and the willingness to release weights openly is becoming a real competitive lever, not just a research courtesy.

## Source

[Read the full story at Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-03/alibaba-drops-another-china-ai-model-with-breakthrough-performance)

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