Alibaba teases open-weight Qwen3.8, claims 2.4T params and near-frontier rank

Alibaba’s Qwen team used a social-media post to preview Qwen3.8, an upcoming model it says will be released with open weights. The headline claims are aggressive: 2.4 trillion parameters, continuous ongoing training, and performance the team positions as among the strongest available — trailing only Anthropic’s Fable 5 among frontier systems. A preview build, Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, is already accessible through Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork for early testers.

Every performance claim here is self-reported and unaccompanied by benchmarks, evaluation methodology, or a hard release date, so the ranking against frontier models should be read as marketing rather than measurement. Raw parameter count also says little about real-world quality, and ‘open-weight soon’ leaves licensing terms, the actual weight drop, and any usage restrictions undefined.

For a security-minded reader, the pricing links warrant caution: they point to qwencloud.com and platform.qianwenai.com, neither of which matches Alibaba’s established Qwen or DashScope properties. Announcement posts that route users to unfamiliar look-alike domains are a common phishing pattern, so credentials or payment details should only be entered on verified official Alibaba Cloud endpoints.