Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max-Preview on July 19, 2026, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, describing it as a 2.4-trillion-parameter sparse mixture-of-experts system that handles text, images, video, and documents. The model is available for early evaluation through Alibaba’s Token Plan and Qoder-related developer platforms, but should be treated as a preview rather than a production-ready open model, as the promised open weights are not yet accompanied by a release date, license, model card, or downloadable checkpoint. As of July 21, 2026, public coverage notes that the preview has no published benchmark table, activated-parameter count, or independent leaderboard result. Alibaba positioned Qwen3.8 as highly competitive with leading frontier systems, reportedly describing it as second only to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, though the same reporting says Alibaba supplied neither task-level scores nor an independent evaluation. The announcement arrived shortly after Moonshot AI introduced Kimi K3, another very large Chinese model. Without the active-parameter count, hardware requirements and inference economics remain difficult to estimate.