Alibaba Group Holding has released its biggest-ever AI model, Qwen3.8-Max, claiming performance on par with global leader Anthropic. The new model is built on 2.4 trillion parameters and ranks higher on several benchmarks than Moonshot’s Kimi K3. Alibaba shared results showing it delivered comparable or sometimes better scores than Anthropic’s Fable 5. The debut comes days after Moonshot’s Kimi, and DeepSeek also expanded access to its latest model, V4 Flash, while ByteDance and MiniMax Group unveiled new video generators on July 31. Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privee, said investors underestimate Chinese AI models due to US chip restrictions, but the gap is narrowing fast. Alibaba’s shares surged as much as 7.3 per cent in Hong Kong on Aug 3. The Hangzhou-headquartered company will release the Qwen3.8-Max weights for public download next week. Alibaba’s Qwen offering is priced at US$2 (S$2.60) per million input tokens and US$6 per million outputs. The new Qwen3.8-Max performs well in autonomous coding and long-horizon execution and was able to independently perform a software engineering project over 16 days in internal testing. The system has also improved in efficiency, activating only some parts when in use to reduce computational costs and latency.