China’s Alibaba takes another swipe at America’s AI supremacy
Chinese tech giant Alibaba released what it says is its largest and "most capable AI model to date," claiming performance rivaling the best systems from US frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as domestic rivals like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. Alibaba said it was making the model, Qwen3.8-Max, widely available to users in a […]
Follow The Verge AI to make it a durable For You signal.
Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max, which it describes as its largest and most capable AI model, and said it is broadly available. The company’s tests and rankings on the crowdsourced Arena.AI platform suggest performance roughly matching, and in some benchmarks exceeding, Anthropic’s Fable 5, though these results have not been independently verified in the report. Alibaba says the model has 2.4 trillion parameters and plans to release its weights next week, returning to open-weight releases after briefly favoring proprietary models. The launch adds to a rapid series of Chinese AI releases and intensifies competition with US frontier labs, while reinforcing open-weight models as a key differentiator for China’s AI industry and a point of debate in Washington and Silicon Valley.