Overview
Qwen3.8-Max is the August 2026 flagship of Alibaba's Qwen-Max line, generally available from August 3, 2026 through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (also branded QwenCloud). It succeeds the July 2026 Qwen3.8-Max-Preview shown at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and sits above the text-only Qwen3.7-Max. Alibaba described it at launch as the most capable model in the Qwen family, and it is the first Max-class Qwen whose weights were also published openly. Alibaba later re-post-trained it for coding and agentic office work and shipped that as the Qwen3.8-Max-0902 snapshot on 2 September 2026.
Technically, Qwen3.8-Max is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 2.4 trillion total parameters and 95 billion active per token, a 1M-token context window (roughly 991K tokens of input and up to 131,072 tokens of output), and a maximum reasoning budget of about 262K tokens. It is natively multimodal — text, image, and video input — and exposes a reasoning-effort control with low, medium, and xhigh settings.
API pricing is $2.00 per million input tokens, $6.00 per million output tokens (including thinking tokens), $0.25 per million tokens for implicit cache reads, and $2.50 per million tokens for explicit cache creation. The weights behind it were subsequently published on Hugging Face as Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B (with an FP8 companion) in August 2026 under a custom licence Qwen names "qwen3.8-max"; that model card describes Qwen3.8-Max as "the official version based on Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B with more features, such as vision input & non-thinking support, 1M context length by default, official built-in tools".
| Released | 2026-08-03 |
|---|---|
| License | Proprietary (hosted API). The underlying weights were published in August 2026 as Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on Hugging Face under a custom licence Qwen names "qwen3.8-max". |
| Weights | API only |
| Parameters | 2.4 trillion total · 95 billion active (sparse Mixture-of-Experts) |
| Context | 1M |
| Max output | 131,072 tokens |
| Architecture | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts. Alibaba positions Qwen3.8-Max as its first Qwen model above one trillion parameters to natively accept text, image, and video inputs. |
| Modalities | Text, Image, Video |
| Status | Generally available |
Benchmarks
- Terminal-Bench 2.186.6%
- PaperBench93%
- OmniDocBench92.1%
- DeepSWE 1.156.6%
Scores on a 0–100 scale (25-point gridlines); higher is better. Each benchmark links to its published source.
Pricing
| Input | $2.00 / 1M tokens |
|---|---|
| Cached input | $0.25 / 1M tokens |
| Output | $6.00 / 1M tokens |
Output pricing includes thinking tokens generated at higher reasoning-effort settings. Explicit cache creation is $2.50 per 1M tokens; explicit cache reads are $0.17 per 1M tokens. The 1M-token context is a single flat tier — the rate does not step up at any threshold.
Strengths
- Frontier multimodal reasoning: natively accepts text, image, and video input at trillion-parameter scale
- Sparse MoE keeps inference cost tractable: 2.4T total parameters, 95B active per token
- Very long context: 1M-token window flat-priced across the whole range, up to ~131K output tokens per request
- Aggressively cheap for a frontier model: $2 input / $6 output per million tokens, with a 90% discount on cached input
- The first Max-class Qwen to open its weights — published in August 2026 as Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on Hugging Face
- Reasoning-effort control (low / medium / xhigh) lets developers trade quality against latency and cost per request
Best for
- Long-horizon coding agents and multi-step engineering workflows that benefit from the 1M-token context
- Multimodal analysis of screenshots, images, and video alongside text prompts
- Enterprise office and productivity automation that combines documents with charts or diagrams
- Cost-sensitive frontier deployments where the $2 / $6 per-MTok rate and cached-input discount matter
- Applications that intend to self-host: prototype on the hosted API, then swap to the open Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B checkpoint
How to access
| Provider | Model ID |
|---|---|
| Alibaba Cloud Model Studio ↗ | qwen3.8-max |
| QwenCloud ↗ | qwen3.8-max |
Qwen-Max — every version
The full lineage of the Qwen-Max line, newest first. Every version has its own page — click any to compare specs, benchmarks and pricing.
| Version | Released | Context | License |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8-Max-0902current | 2026-09-02 | 1M | Proprietary |
| Qwen3.8-Max | 2026-08-03 | 1M | Proprietary (weights published as Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B) |
| Qwen3.8-Max-Preview | 2026-07-19 | — | Proprietary |
| Qwen3.7-Max | 2026-05 | — | Proprietary |
| Qwen3-Max | 2025-09 | — | Proprietary |
| Qwen2.5-Max | 2025-01-29 | — | Proprietary |
FAQ
When was Qwen3.8-Max released?
Alibaba announced the general availability of Qwen3.8-Max on August 3, 2026, on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (also branded QwenCloud). The July 19, 2026 Qwen3.8-Max-Preview shown at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai was superseded by this release. The open weights behind the model followed on Hugging Face later in August 2026 as Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B.
How many parameters does Qwen3.8-Max have?
Qwen3.8-Max is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 2.4 trillion total parameters and 95 billion active parameters per token. The active-parameter count was not disclosed at the July preview and was published with the August 3 general-availability release.
What is Qwen3.8-Max's context window?
Qwen3.8-Max has a 1M-token context window — roughly 991,000 tokens of input and up to 131,072 tokens of output per request — priced as a single flat tier with no rate change at any threshold. Its maximum reasoning budget is about 262,000 tokens.
How much does Qwen3.8-Max cost?
Qwen3.8-Max is $2.00 per million input tokens and $6.00 per million output tokens (including thinking tokens) on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. Implicit cache reads are $0.25 per million tokens (a 90% discount on input), explicit cache creation is $2.50 per million, and explicit cache reads are $0.17 per million tokens.
Is Qwen3.8-Max open source?
Not on release day — Qwen3.8-Max was proprietary and API-only on August 3, 2026. The weights behind it were published later in August 2026 as Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on Hugging Face (plus an FP8 checkpoint) under a custom licence Qwen names "qwen3.8-max", making it the first Max-class Qwen released with open weights. The hosted Qwen3.8-Max adds vision input, non-thinking support, a 1M default context and built-in tools on top of that checkpoint.
What modalities does Qwen3.8-Max support?
Qwen3.8-Max natively accepts text, image, and video input, and returns text output. Alibaba positions it as the first Qwen model above one trillion parameters to be natively multimodal.