India, July 20 -- Alibaba's Qwen team on July 19 unveiled Qwen 3.8, a 2.4 trillion-parameter multimodal AI model that the company says rivals the world's leading frontier systems. The team described the model as "second only to Fable 5" - a reference to Anthropic's top-tier Claude model - though Alibaba has not yet published independent benchmarks to support the claim.

Qwen 3.8 is built on a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture and represents the team's first multimodal model exceeding one trillion parameters. It can process text, images, videos, and documents. A preview is available now through Alibaba's Token Plan subscription service, its Qoder coding platform, and QoderWork productivity suite at 10% of standard pricing.

The launch...