Alibaba Just Gave Away Its Best AI Model For Free, Almost Matching Claude and ChatGPT
In briefQwen3.8-Max runs 2.4 trillion parameters and is the first Max-class Qwen model Alibaba will release as open weights.It ships with setup instructions for Anthropics Claude Code and OpenAIs Codex—rival tools.On Alibabas own benchmark table, Fable 5 wins 15 of 31 tests. Qwen3.8-Max wins seven. Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max on Monday, calling it the most capable model it has ever built. The weights land on Hugging Face and ModelScope next week—the first time the company has given away a model at Max scale. The specs are big: 2.4 trillion parameters total, with 95 billion switched on at any moment. Parameters are the number of dials a model is able to handle. This is extremely important for efficiency as it means it would not require too much resources to run. Think of it as a huge library where only the relevant shelf lights up for each question. Small businesses and labs with good enough hardware are now able to run a state-of-the-art model without spending the same as a huge datacenter. Alibabas release post skips the usual benchmark-chasing narrative and leans on endurance instead. The model spent 16 days building a coding tool by itself—265 commits, 127 pull requests, 151 issues, no human touching the keyboard.