(Aug 3): Alibaba Group Holding Ltd released its latest flagship artificial intelligence (AI) model, with performance claims putting it alongside global leaders like Anthropic’s Fable.

The new model, Qwen3.8-Max, is built around 2.4 trillion parameters and ranks higher on several benchmarks than the headline-grabbing Kimi K3 from Moonshot that was recently unveiled. Alibaba shared results showing it delivering comparable or sometimes better scores than Anthropic’s Fable 5, a cutting-edge AI model that was temporarily put under export controls by the US due to its advanced capabilities. 

The debut comes after Moonshot’s Kimi K3 sent ripples through stock markets and Silicon Valley last month as Chinese developers showed they could quickly catch up with the top models crafted by Anthropic and OpenAI despite relatively constrained computing resources. DeepSeek also just expanded access to its latest model, V4 Flash, last week.

“Many investors continue to underestimate Chinese AI models because of US chip restrictions or general scepticism,” said Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privée. “In reality, the gap is probably much closer, and narrowing fast. Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 is another proof point, following Kimi K3.”

Alibaba’s shares surged by as much as 7.3%, the most in nearly a month, in Hong Kong on Monday.

The Hangzhou-based internet pioneer intends to release the Qwen3.8-Max weights for public download next week, which will allow users to customise the technology, marking the next major move in the intensifying race among China’s AI contenders that include Moonshot, DeepSeek, Z.ai and ByteDance Ltd.

The new Qwen3.8-Max performs well in autonomous coding and long-horizon execution, and was able to independently execute a software engineering project over 16 days in internal testing, Alibaba said. The new system has also improved in efficiency, activating only some parts when in use to reduce computational costs and latency.

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