SI Model · Alibaba Qwen
Qwen3.8-Max
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| Developer | Alibaba Qwen |
|---|---|
| Released | August 3, 2026 |
| Status | Current |
| Inputs | Text |
| Context window | 1M tokens |
| API price (input) | $2 / 1M tokens |
| API price (output) | $6 / 1M tokens |
| Open weights | Yes |
| Access | QwenCloud, Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, Hugging Face |
Specs and list prices last verified October 8, 2026. Prices change often; check the provider before you buy.
Strengths
- Largest open-weights language model released to date
- 1M-token context
- 95B active parameters per token
Best for
- Organisations that want a frontier-scale model they can host
- Multilingual and Chinese-language applications
- Research on very large open models
Qwen3.8-Max is the top model from Alibaba’s Qwen team. It launched on August 3, 2026 as a hosted model. On August 13, Alibaba released its weights as Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, the first time it opened a Max-tier model.
Key specs
- Architecture: mixture of experts with about 2.4 trillion total and 95 billion active parameters
- Context window: 1 million tokens on the hosted API; the released open checkpoint supports 262,144 tokens natively, extensible to about 1 million
- API price: about $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens (QwenCloud; varies by region)
- Weights: published on Hugging Face (text-only checkpoint; the hosted API also accepts images and video)
Can you actually run it?
Downloading is free; running it is not. A model this size needs a large multi-GPU server cluster, which is why some commentators called it the open model “nobody can run”. Most users will access it via API, while the release lets well-resourced organisations host and audit it themselves. Alibaba also released the much smaller Qwen3.8-27B for local use.
Compare
Sources
- Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B: Alibaba Open-Weights Its Max-Tier Flagship — NYU Shanghai RITS
- Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-Max — DataNorth
Written by
Luka Kušec · Editor
Editor of SI.info. Writes about Super Intelligence, technology policy and the people building frontier models.