Chinese tech company Alibaba unveiled today Qwen3.8-Max, its most advanced artificial intelligence model to date, marking a new step in the competition between leading Chinese and American developers of reasoning, programming and autonomous agent systems.
The official Qwen account on social media platform X announced that the model, described as the most advanced ever developed by the company, has 2.4 trillion parameters and was designed for programming tasks, collaborative work, and extended project execution.
According to the company, Qwen3.8-Max can sustain more than 10 days of autonomous development through to the completion of a full project.
Alibaba also stated that the system was designed for long-term autonomous planning tasks, incorporating cycles of learning and correction, citing as examples optimizing semiconductor design or e-commerce strategies over extended periods.
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The group indicated it will release the model’s weights in open format next week, following the strategy adopted by several Chinese developers of favoring open models, in contrast to the closed approach taken by American companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic.
According to comparisons released by Qwen, the new model outperforms the previous version and achieves better results than some American systems in programming tests, autonomous agents, visual reasoning and video comprehension, though results vary depending on the evaluation criteria.
The company set pricing at two dollars (1.7 euros) per million input tokens and six dollars (5.2 euros) per million output tokens, the minimum units of text processed by language models.
Qwen has become one of the main pillars of Alibaba’s bet on artificial intelligence and cloud computing, areas in which the group has announced investments exceeding 52 billion dollars (45 billion euros) over three years.
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The launch comes at a time of strong momentum in China’s AI sector, following the unveiling of models such as Kimi K3, from Moonshot, and GLM-5.2, from Zhipu, amid intense technological competition between China and the United States over technologies considered strategic.
