Alibaba has released a preview of Qwen3.8 Max, a 2.4 trillion-parameter model the company says will follow with open weights in the coming weeks. The preview went live Sunday on Alibaba’s Token Plan, alongside its Qoder and QoderWork coding platforms.

Qwen3.8 Max is a sparse mixture of experts model and, according to Qwen developer Shuai Bai, the team’s first multimodal system above one trillion parameters, handling text, images, video and documents. Alibaba says the model should outperform its predecessor, Qwen3.7 Max, on coding, full stack development, data analysis and office tasks, and that it is compatible with existing OpenAI and Anthropic tooling, letting developers point current coding agents at it without rebuilding their setups.

Alibaba says Qwen3.8 is competitive with leading frontier models and positions it just behind Anthropic’s Fable 5, though independent evaluations have not yet confirmed those claims. No benchmark table, model card or license has been published alongside the preview, and Alibaba has not disclosed how many of the model’s 2.4 trillion parameters are active per token a figure that determines real world serving cost for any sparse model of this size.

The release lands three days after Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, an open-weight model with a reported 2.8 trillion parameters, and follows a string of large releases from Chinese labs this year, including DeepSeek’s V4 Pro, currently the largest open weight model actually shipped at 1.6 trillion parameters, and models from MiniMax and Zhipu AI. Alibaba’s own trillion-parameter run started with Qwen3 Max Preview in September 2025, followed by Qwen3.6 Max Preview in April, which broke from the company’s usual practice by launching as a closed preview rather than open weights from day one. Qwen3.8 is following the same pattern for now: a proprietary preview ahead of a promised open release.

If Alibaba does open-source the full 2.4 trillion-parameter model as promised, it would be roughly 1.5 times larger than any open-weight model released to date. Until then, the preview remains what Alibaba calls a continuously evolving build, meaning its behavior may change or the model itself may be replaced before a production version ships.