Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. today previewed the most powerful artificial intelligence model in its Qwen family, Qwen3.8, and claimed the system trails only Anthropic PBC’s Claude Fable 5 among the world’s frontier models.
The company revealed the model, offered as a preview build called Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, today at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. It accommodates 2.4 trillion parameters, making it the first Qwen model above 1 trillion parameters to process images, video and documents alongside text.
Alibaba’s Qwen team said in a post on X that the model ranks “second only to Fable 5,” a reference to Anthropic’s recent release. It offered no benchmark scores to support the claim and no independent evaluation has verified the ranking.
That absence stands out. Alibaba’s previous flagship, Qwen3.7-Max, shipped in May with a full set of published results, including a score of 56.6 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. The Qwen3.8 preview arrived with no model card, no activated-parameter count and no benchmark data at all.
Alibaba published no task-level comparison with Qwen3.7-Max and described the new model only as “continuously evolving.” Open weights are promised “soon,” though the company has not set a date or published license terms.
The preview is available now through Alibaba’s Token Plan subscription and its Qoder and QoderWork developer platforms, priced at 10% of the standard rate during the trial period.
The timing places Qwen3.8 directly against a domestic rival. Chinese AI startup Beijing Moonshot AI Technology Co. Ltd. released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter model, three days earlier. Both launches push Chinese developers into the multi-trillion-parameter tier, a scale until recently associated mainly with the largest U.S. labs
Alibaba has made Qwen central to its effort to position itself as China’s default AI supplier. Over the past year the company has released a steady run of open-weight models while building out cloud infrastructure and custom chips to run them. The open-weight approach has helped Qwen assemble one of the largest developer followings of any Chinese model family, a base it now hopes to carry into the trillion-parameter class.
For enterprise buyers weighing the announcement, the comparison with Fable 5 is Alibaba’s alone. No independent leaderboard has scored Qwen3.8 yet, and the last Qwen model that was ranked, Qwen3.7-Max, sits well down LMArena’s list, where Fable 5 is No. 1. Benchmarks and the promised open weights would settle it, but Alibaba has released neither.
Image: Alibaba/X
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
Are you AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE Financially by buying your AWS services from our Marketplace portal page and links.
https://siliconangle.com/aws-marketplace/
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
