Alibaba shares rally after unveiling its 'most powerful' AI model as U.S.-China competition heats up

Alibaba unveiled its latest and "most powerful" AI model Qwen3.8-Max on Monday as Chinese companies race to close the AI gap with the U.S.

Qwen3.8-Max, which is scheduled for release next week, boasts 2.4 trillion parameters, making it one of the "most powerful" AI models in the Chinese tech giant's Qwen family of AI models to date, Alibaba said. Parameters refer to the numerical settings that shape how AI processes information and generates responses.

The model also supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens, which means it can understand and work with thousands of pages of information. Alibaba's New York-listed shares were up 4.5% in premarket trading, while its shares rose 7% on the Hong Kong exchange.

Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares year-to-date.

The model's capabilities also include coding, real-life work, research, long-horizon tasks and visual intelligence.

Alibaba shared results showing it delivering comparable or sometimes better scores than Anthropic's Fable 5. The model also only ranks second to Fable 5 in the Vision Arena, and fifth in the Text Arena.

It comes after domestic rival Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 earlier this month, which has 2.8 trillion parameters, making it China's largest AI model.

Meanwhile, Qwen3.8-Max can code highly autonomously for weeks with little human input, Alibaba said. In one internal test, it spent 16 days building and improving an AI coding tool by writing code, testing it, fixing errors, and refining its work on its own.

It can also manage real-world workloads such as reviewing legal documents, conducting financial research, or architectural 3D modeling.

Its visual intelligence spans being able to understand hundred-page documents, television series, or 100-hour livestreams and turning them into searchable, interactive knowledge hubs.