Alibaba Releases Qwen3.8 Max Preview, Claims Performance Second Only to Anthropic Fable 5, Rises Over 3% Pre-Market

TradingKey - On July 19, Eastern Time, Alibaba announced on social media platform X the launch of the preview version of its flagship large model Qwen3.8 Max, with a parameter scale of 2.4 trillion. The company claims its comprehensive capability is globally "second only to Anthropic's Claude Fable 5".

[Source: X]

The preview version of Qwen3.8 Max is now live on Alibaba's Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork platforms, allowing developers to experience it first. Alibaba stated that an open-weight version will be released in the future.

The timing of this release is quite intriguing. On July 17, Moonshot AI had just released Kimi K3, featuring a parameter scale of 2.8 trillion and claimed to be the world's largest open-source model, with multiple benchmark results already close to Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. The products of both companies entered the global top tier of large models almost simultaneously. Meanwhile, Alibaba itself is a major shareholder of Moonshot AI. Public information shows that Alibaba has continuously increased its investment in Moonshot AI's multiple funding rounds, leading a Series A round of approximately $800 million in 2024, and holding an approximately 36% stake in Moonshot AI as of March 2024.

Michael Burry, the real-life prototype of the core character in the movie "The Big Short," commented on Substack that Alibaba's rapid release of Qwen3.8 Max was clearly a direct response to Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. In terms of product performance, Alibaba officially claims the model is one of the world's most powerful, with comprehensive capabilities second only to Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.

Reportedly, the model had previously debuted anonymously under the codename "Kaleb" on the large model blind-testing platform LMArena, demonstrating strong performance in front-end capabilities; the open-weight version is expected to launch globally by the end of July.

[Source: Substack]

Last week, Apple received regulatory approval to integrate Alibaba's Qwen AI technology into the Chinese version of the Apple Intelligence platform. Alibaba stated that Qwen AI will provide text and image recognition and generation functions for Chinese users.

As of press time on July 20, Alibaba's US-listed shares rose over 3% in pre-market trading, trading around $119.

[Source: Futu]