Alibaba Group Holding LtdAlibaba released Qwen3.8-Max with competitive pricing and performance, driving shares up

Alibaba released its Qwen3.8-Max model on August 3, 2026, setting API pricing at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens on OpenRouter, achieving direct price parity with OpenAI's GPT-5.6. The model uses a 2.4 trillion total parameter architecture with roughly 95 billion active parameters at inference and is designed for complex tool-calling and agentic workflows. Alibaba's internal metrics claim scores of 86.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 93.0 on PaperBench, and 67.7 on SWE-bench Pro, while on Arena.AI it ranks fifth for text with a score of 1496 and second globally for vision with a score of 1305, trailing only Claude Fable 5. The company plans to release open weights around August 10, a move that bypasses federal security reviews under the current White House Framework and targets the high-end segment despite DeepSeek V4-Flash remaining significantly cheaper at $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens. Alibaba's Hong Kong shares rose approximately 7% and its NYSE ADR climbed roughly 4.5% on the day of the announcement.
Alibaba Group Holding LtdAlibaba released Qwen3.8-Max with competitive pricing and performance, driving shares up
Astera Labs, Inc.DeepSeek's cheaper model faces new high-end competitor from Alibaba
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 now faces price parity from Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max