Alibaba on Monday introduced Qwen3.8-Max, its largest artificial intelligence model to date, an open-weight model designed for software engineering, multimodal reasoning, and other knowledge-intensive business workloads. In a blog post, Alibaba described it as a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model that activates only about 95 billion parameters during inference. Open-weight versions are scheduled for release next week through Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio. Alibaba said in an X post, “We believe it’s one of the most powerful model available today, compatible to leading frontier AI models, second only to Fable 5.” The company published internal test results comparing Qwen3.8-Max against Claude Opus 4.8, Claude Fable 5, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol on coding benchmarks, including SWE-bench Pro and a proprietary evaluation called NL2Repo-Bench, using each vendor’s own coding harness. Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said Alibaba is narrowing the gap, but the larger story is the rapid maturation of open-weight models. Alibaba also tested the model on three unsupervised, multi-day coding projects, including one that took 16 days to complete without human assistance. The company highlighted enterprise applications across legal compliance, financial analysis, engineering design, quantitative research, and multimodal content creation. Amit Jena, development manager for AI at Kaner