China's tech giant Alibaba on Monday unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, its largest and most capable AI model to date, intensifying the country's race to develop powerful yet cost-efficient artificial intelligence systems.

The model features 2.4 trillion parameters, second only to Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 with 2.8 trillion parameters. It also quickly secured top rankings on Arena.AI, a crowdsourced benchmark for AI models, ranking fifth globally in text performance and second in vision, behind only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.

Built on a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture, Qwen3.8-Max assigns tasks to specialized components rather than activating the entire model for every query. It uses only 95 billion parameters at a time, significantly reducing costs and latency while handling text, image and video processing with a context window of up to 1 million tokens.

Alibaba said the model delivers "comprehensive improvements across coding, work, research, and long-horizon tasks," enabling it not only to handle more complex queries but also to complete multi-step tasks end-to-end with greater reliability and produce more dependable outputs.

In a demonstration of its autonomous coding capabilities, Alibaba said Qwen3.8-Max completed a multi-day software engineering project from scratch without human intervention, ranking fourth on the Frontend Code Arena leaderboard with a score of 1,668.

Alibaba plans to open-source the model's weights next week.

The release follows growing momentum in China's AI sector. In July, Chinese startup Moonshot AI drew global attention with the releasing of Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model that currently holds the record as the world's largest open-source AI model by parameter count.

(With input from Reuters)