Qwen3.8 Max

Alibaba Cloudflagship NewOpen Source

Reached GA on 3 Aug 2026 and, around 12–14 Aug, became the first Qwen-Max-class model Alibaba has ever open-weighted — following its 19 Jul preview at WAIC Shanghai. Still a 2.4T-parameter sparse MoE (active-parameter count undisclosed), but treat the hosted API and the open weights as two different products: the published checkpoint is reportedly text-only, dropping the vision and 1M-context features the hosted API keeps. Weights ship under a new custom revenue-share license, not Apache 2.0 — large commercial 'model-as-a-service' deployments above an unspecified threshold need a separate agreement with Alibaba, so check the license before redistributing. Vendor-reported scores at GA: Terminal-Bench 2.1 86.6 (vs. Claude Opus 4.8/Fable 5 at 84.6, GPT-5.6 Sol at 88.8), SWE-bench Pro 67.7, GPQA Diamond 92.6, DeepSWE 1.1 56.6 (up from 21.6 on Qwen3.7 Max) — independent Arena/AA verification is still catching up as of 17 Aug 2026, though early Arena placement (~1491) already makes it the highest-ranked open-weight model on the board. Hosted API pricing dropped from the preview placeholder to $2/$6 per 1M tokens ($0.25 cached).

Context Window

1M

tokens

Max Output

131K

tokens

Input Price

$2

per 1M tokens

Output Price

$6

per 1M tokens

Speed

86

tokens/sec

Released

Aug 2026

2026-08-03

Blended Cost

$4.00

per 1M tokens

Value Score

24.0

quality per $

Capabilities

ChatVisionFunction CallingCode GenerationReasoning

Benchmarks

Quality Index
96
MMLU Pro
89.6
HumanEval (Coding)
93
MATH
95.2
Arena ELO
1491

Price vs Quality

6080100$1.00$10.00$100.00Blended cost per 1M tokens (log scale) →GPT-4o — $6.25/1M, quality 85GPT-4o Mini — $0.375/1M, quality 72o3 Mini — $2.75/1M, quality 88o3 — $5.00/1M, quality 94GPT-4.1 — $5.00/1M, quality 89Claude Opus 4 — $45.00/1M, quality 91Claude Sonnet 4 — $9.00/1M, quality 88Claude 3.5 Haiku — $2.40/1M, quality 75Gemini 2.5 Pro — $5.63/1M, quality 92Gemini 2.0 Flash — $0.250/1M, quality 74Llama 4 Maverick — $0.400/1M, quality 80Llama 4 Scout — $0.275/1M, quality 71Mistral Large 2 — $4.00/1M, quality 79Codestral — $0.600/1M, quality 76DeepSeek V3 — $0.685/1M, quality 86DeepSeek R1 — $1.37/1M, quality 91Grok 3 — $9.00/1M, quality 87Grok 3 Mini — $0.400/1M, quality 78Command R+ — $6.25/1M, quality 68Amazon Nova Pro — $2.00/1M, quality 70Qwen 2.5 72B — $0.600/1M, quality 80Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B — $0.300/1M, quality 74Sonar Pro — $9.00/1M, quality 78GPT-5.5 — $17.50/1M, quality 97GPT-5.5 Pro — $105.00/1M, quality 96Claude Opus 4.7 — $15.00/1M, quality 96Gemini 3.1 Pro — $7.00/1M, quality 96DeepSeek V4 Pro — $1.32/1M, quality 89DeepSeek V4 Flash — $0.210/1M, quality 84Qwen 3.6 Plus — $3.50/1M, quality 86Grok 4.3 — $1.88/1M, quality 93Kimi K2.6 — $2.11/1M, quality 92Kimi K3 — $9.00/1M, quality 97Claude Sonnet 4.6 — $9.00/1M, quality 90GLM-5.1 — $2.03/1M, quality 88Claude Opus 4.8 — $15.00/1M, quality 98Qwen 3.7 Max — $5.00/1M, quality 94Claude Fable 5 — $30.00/1M, quality 100MiniMax M3 — $1.50/1M, quality 89GPT-5.6 Sol — $17.50/1M, quality 98GPT-5.6 Terra — $7.00/1M, quality 93GPT-5.6 Luna — $0.700/1M, quality 83Gemini 3.6 Flash — $2.25/1M, quality 90Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite — $1.40/1M, quality 79Claude Sonnet 5 — $9.00/1M, quality 93GLM-5.2 — $2.90/1M, quality 91Claude Opus 5 — $15.00/1M, quality 99Claude Mythos 5 — $30.00/1M, quality 100Grok 4.5 — $4.00/1M, quality 94Qwen3.8 Max — $4.00/1M, quality 96Qwen3.8 Max
Cheaper is left, more capable is up. Nothing in the directory is both cheaper and at least as capable. Self-host models are left off the price axis — their cost depends on the hardware you run them on, not on tokens.

Context Window in Context

  • Qwen3.8 Max1M
  • GPT-4.11M
  • Gemini 2.5 Pro1M
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash1M
  • Llama 4 Maverick1M
  • GPT-5.51M
  • GPT-5.5 Pro1M
  • Claude Opus 4.71M
Bar length is logarithmic — each full step is 10× the tokens. Shown against the models with the nearest context windows, not the directory extremes.

Pricing History

Jul 19, 2026$2.5 / $7.5(launch)
Aug 3, 2026$2 / $6current

Open Source: Licensed under Custom (revenue-share; not Apache 2.0)

Not on our gateway yet

Qwen3.8 Max is open-weight, so you can run it yourself. Swfte Connect turns your deployment into a managed endpoint that speaks the same API as every other model in this directory.

The request
curl https://api.swfte.com/agents/v2/gateway/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SWFTE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "alibaba:qwen3.8-max",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
  }'
Deploy this model with Swfte Connect

About Qwen3.8 Max

Qwen3.8 Max is a flagship AI model by Alibaba Cloud, released on August 3, 2026. It supports a context window of 1000K tokens and can generate up to 131K output tokens.

At $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, its blended cost of $4.00/1M tokens puts it in the mid-range pricing tier. Its value score of 24.0 reflects the balance of quality and cost.

Qwen3.8 Max is available as an open-source model under the Custom (revenue-share; not Apache 2.0) license, meaning you can self-host it for predictable costs or use it through API providers like Swfte Connect.

Using Qwen3.8 Max with Swfte

Access Qwen3.8 Max through Swfte Connect, our unified LLM gateway. Connect gives you a single API for 50+ models, with automatic routing, cost optimization, and fallback handling. You can also try Qwen3.8 Max in our AI Playground before integrating.

Deploy a model with Swfte Connect

One gateway, every provider, per-token cost visibility. Swap models without touching your code.