Qwen3.8-Max is a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts large language model developed by Alibaba's Qwen team and released on August 3, 2026 under the title "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork".[1] It is the production flagship of the Qwen3.8 generation, which had been available since July 19, 2026 only as the hosted qwen3.8-max-preview service.[5] Alibaba calls it "the most capable model in the Qwen family to date" and, in a break with the closed-weight Qwen-Max line that includes Qwen3-Max and Qwen3.7-Max, announced that Qwen3.8-Max will be the first Max-class model published as open weights, promised for the week after launch together with a smaller Qwen3.8-27B.[1][2] As of August 5, 2026, the weights had not yet appeared in Qwen's Hugging Face organization and no license had been named.[11]

Key facts

Item	Detail
Developer	Qwen team, Alibaba
Released	August 3, 2026 (preview since July 19, 2026) [1][5]
Parameters	2.4 trillion total, 95 billion active per token [1]
Architecture	Mixture-of-experts, "built upon the architectural foundation of Qwen3.5" [1][4]
Context window	1M tokens (max input 991K, max output 131K, max reasoning 262K) [4]
Modalities	Text, image, and video input; text output [4]
API pricing	$2 per 1M input tokens, $6 per 1M output tokens, $0.25 per 1M implicitly cached [2][4]
Access	QwenCloud API (`qwen3.8-max`), Qwen Studio chat [1][2]
Weights	Promised on Hugging Face and ModelScope "next week"; not yet published as of August 5, 2026, license unannounced [1][11]

Release

Alibaba introduced the Qwen3.8 generation on July 19, 2026 as qwen3.8-max-preview, available through Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork, describing a continuously evolving 2.4-trillion-parameter model that the company claimed was "second only to Fable 5" and would go open weight.[5] The production release followed on August 3, 2026, announced in a Qwen team blog post published at 10:00 Beijing time and an accompanying thread from the official Qwen account.[1][2] Alibaba Group's corporate account called it "the largest and most capable flagship model to date" with 2.4 trillion parameters and a 1 million-token context window.[3]

The release landed within hours of another Chinese frontier release: MiniMax announced its open-weight MiniMax-H3 less than an hour after Qwen's first post the same morning.[9]

The blog post states that "this also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model", with the weights to be released on Hugging Face and ModelScope in the week following the announcement; the launch thread added that Qwen3.8-27B, a smaller model, "is also going open-weights".[1][2] Analyst Ben Thompson, in commentary relayed by Simon Willison when the plan was first announced in July, theorized that the decision, a reversal of Alibaba's choice not to release Qwen3.7-Max weights in May 2026, may have been influenced by Xi Jinping's public call to "encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing".[8] As of August 5, 2026, no Qwen3.8 repository had appeared in Qwen's Hugging Face organization, consistent with the announced schedule, and Alibaba had not named a license for either model.[11]

Positioning: coding and "Cowork"

The "Cowork" in the release title is not a separate product. Alibaba uses the word for the model's ability to carry out real professional work autonomously inside agent harnesses, the subject of the blog post's "Work" section, and measures it with CoWorkBench, an in-house benchmark the company describes as covering "long-horizon tasks across computer science, finance, law, medical, and other productivity domains".[1] Alibaba says it trained this capability by jointly scaling reinforcement-learning environments and compute across several harnesses, naming QwenWork, Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, and Hermes, with a unified reward system spanning execution checks, rubric-based judging, and agentic inspection.[1] Alibaba Cloud's launch messaging framed the model as an "always-on workmate" for coding, reasoning, research, writing, and AI agents.[2]

Vendor demonstrations

All of the following results are Alibaba's own reported outcomes, not independent evaluations.[1]

In coding, Alibaba's headline demonstration is a "10+ day" autonomous run in which the model built oh-my-cli, a command-line agent project, from an empty folder: requirements entered GitHub issues, agents claimed and executed them through a state machine, and changes passed end-to-end tests before merging. Alibaba says that as of July 30, 2026, after roughly 16 days of fully autonomous operation, the repository held 265 commits, 127 pull requests, and 151 issues; the project trace is public on GitHub.[1][10] A second demonstration had the model reproduce a research paper on data selection for LLM reasoning from nothing but the paper and GPUs, then improve on it: about five days of continuous work, roughly 7,600 lines of code, 33 rounds of GPU training, and a final method Alibaba says beats the paper's own approach by 2.7 points on AIME24.[1] In a third, the model entered a live Tianchi data-science competition under a 24-hour limit and, across 45 submissions, reached an accuracy of 0.853, which Alibaba says beat 458 of 526 human teams.[1]

For long-horizon tasks, Alibaba reports that the model autonomously optimized a cryptographic hardware accelerator design over roughly 500 turns, cutting the synthesized design from 8,298 to 678 gates and passing place-and-route timing closure at 500 MHz in an OpenROAD flow.[1] On E-Commerce Bench, a 365-day simulated store-operation benchmark built on Taobao and Tmall transaction data, Alibaba says the model turned 100,000 yuan of starting capital into a top-ranked 416,252 yuan, 38 percent ahead of second-place GLM 5.2 and a 152 percent improvement over Qwen3.7-Max.[1]

On the multimodal side, Alibaba says the model can work across financial reports and PDFs longer than 200 pages and videos longer than 100 hours, organizing people, events, and scenes into a "video memory graph", and can pair coding with GUI operation as a "Hybrid Agent" that verifies its own output against a running application. Alongside the model, the company introduced RecreationBench, an internal benchmark in which a model must rebuild a running application it can only observe as a black box, and Qwen-MM-Plugins, a harness extension library for multimodal agents.[1]

Benchmarks

Alibaba published a large self-reported comparison table against Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Fable 5, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, and its own Qwen3.7-Max (with Qwen3.7-Plus as the baseline on multimodal rows). Selected scores:[1]

Benchmark (Alibaba-reported)	Qwen3.8-Max	Qwen3.7-Max	Claude Fable 5	GPT-5.6 Sol
Terminal Bench 2.1	86.6	74.5	84.6	88.8
SWE-bench Pro	67.7	60.6	80.0	64.6
FrontierSWE	73.5	40.7	88.8	not listed
PaperBench	93.0	64.8	88.8	90.5
CoWorkBench	74.8	64.6	75.9	71.5
GPQA Diamond	92.6	92.4	92.6	94.1
Humanity's Last Exam	43.6	41.4	53.3	47.2
IFBench	82.8	79.1	63.5	72.7

Alibaba's own table therefore does not show a uniform lead: Qwen3.8-Max posts the top listed score on PaperBench, IFBench, and many multimodal rows such as OSWorld-Verified (86.1) and OmniDocBench 1.5 (92.1), but trails Claude Fable 5 on several coding and reasoning benchmarks, including SWE-bench Pro, FrontierSWE, and Humanity's Last Exam.[1] The table's footnotes matter for interpretation: many rows were evaluated with the Claude Code harness, several benchmarks (PaperBench, CoWorkBench, QwenSWEBench, RecreationBench, and others) are Alibaba's own in-house constructions or were "corrected" versions of public sets, and one footnote states that "Fable5 results may involve fallbacks".[1]

Independently, Artificial Analysis scored Qwen3.8-Max at 53 on its Intelligence Index (v4.1) on release day, which it described as well above the median of 32 for reasoning models in a similar price tier. The evaluator also flagged extreme verbosity, with the model generating 150 million tokens during the index run against a median of 63 million, and measured output speed of 46.5 tokens per second on Alibaba's API, below the tier median of 72.0.[7] Because Artificial Analysis has revised its index methodology between releases, this score is not directly comparable to the 56.6 that Qwen3.7-Max recorded on an earlier index version.

Availability, API, and pricing

Qwen3.8-Max is served through QwenCloud under the model identifier qwen3.8-max, with OpenAI-compatible chat-completions and responses endpoints, an Anthropic-compatible API, and endpoints in Beijing, Singapore, and the United States (Virginia); it is also available to chat users in Qwen Studio.[1][2] The QwenCloud model page lists a 1M-token context window with a maximum input of 991K tokens, maximum output of 131K tokens, maximum reasoning budget of 262K tokens, and text, image, and video input.[4]

The API exposes a reasoning_effort parameter with levels low, medium, and xhigh (the default), and enables preserve_thinking by default so prior reasoning content carries across turns.[1] Alibaba documents integrations with Claude Code, Codex, Qoder CLI, Qwen Code, and OpenClaw.[1] Pricing is $2.00 per million input tokens and $6.00 per million output tokens, with implicit cache hits billed at $0.25 per million; the model page also lists explicit cache creation at $2.50 and explicit cache reads at $0.17 per million tokens.[2][4]

Reception

Coverage centered on the scale claim and the open-weights turn. The Decoder reported the release as Alibaba positioning a 2.4-trillion-parameter model, with 95 billion active parameters per query, for long-horizon autonomous work, and noted that Qwen3.8-Max is the first Qwen-Max-class model whose weights are to be made public.[6] Simon Willison, who had tested the preview, highlighted the model's reasoning traces during his informal SVG-drawing test and observed that at 2.4 trillion parameters the model is nearly as large as the 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3.[8] Until the promised weights, license, and technical report actually ship, most launch claims, including the demonstration results above, rest on Alibaba's own reporting.[1][6]

On August 3, 2026, the Qwen account also posted a screenshot of the LMArena Text Arena leaderboard with the caption "Alibaba hits #2 on the Text Arena": in the leaderboard's lab-ranking view, dated August 1, 2026, Alibaba placed second among model providers behind Anthropic on the strength of Qwen3.8-Max, whose model-level rank in the same screenshot was fifth.[12] As of August 5, 2026, the live text leaderboard showed qwen3.8-max in fifth place among individual models, with a preliminary Arena score of 1496 from 3,327 votes, the highest placement of any non-Anthropic model: behind Claude Fable 5 (1509) and three Claude Opus variants, and ahead of Google's Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.[13]

See also

References

Qwen Team. "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork." August 3, 2026. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8
Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen). Qwen3.8-Max release thread (pricing, open-weights plan, Qwen3.8-27B). X, August 3, 2026. https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084100707423289643
Alibaba Group (@AlibabaGroup). Qwen3.8-Max announcement post. X, August 3, 2026. https://x.com/AlibabaGroup/status/2084102898796105964
QwenCloud. "Qwen3.8-Max" model page. Accessed August 5, 2026. https://www.qwencloud.com/models/qwen3.8-max
Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen). Qwen3.8-Max-Preview launch post. X, July 19, 2026. https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2078759124914098291
The Decoder. "Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3.8-Max takes on long-horizon AI tasks with 2.4 trillion parameters." August 3, 2026. https://the-decoder.com/alibabas-open-weight-qwen3-8-max-takes-on-long-horizon-ai-tasks-with-2-4-trillion-parameters/
Artificial Analysis. "Qwen3.8 Max - Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis." Accessed via Internet Archive snapshot of August 3, 2026. https://web.archive.org/web/20260803215115/https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-max
Simon Willison. "Who's Afraid of Chinese Models?" July 20, 2026. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/afraid-of-chinese-models/
MiniMax (@MiniMax_AI). "MiniMax-H3 Is Now Publicly Available." X, August 3, 2026. https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2084106804032872591
qwen-code-dev-bot. "oh-my-cli" repository. GitHub. Accessed August 5, 2026. https://github.com/qwen-code-dev-bot/oh-my-cli
Qwen. Hugging Face organization page. Accessed August 5, 2026. https://huggingface.co/Qwen
Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen). "Alibaba hits #2 on the Text Arena." X, August 3, 2026. https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084111492182659552
LMArena. Text Arena leaderboard. Accessed August 5, 2026. https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text

Editing: Qwen3.8-Max