Alibaba opened a Max-class Qwen for the first time — 2.4 trillion parameters, and a licence that is not Apache

Alibaba published the weights of Qwen3.8-Max on Hugging Face at 10:00 Beijing time today, the first time a Max-class Qwen model has been opened. It carries 2.4 trillion parameters in total and activates 95 billion per token across 512 experts, arrives as 213 separate files, and handles 262,144 tokens of context natively, extensible to about a million. On Qwen's own scorecard it reaches 86.6 on Terminal Bench 2.1, above Opus 4.8 at 84.6 and below GPT-5.6 Sol at 88.8. The licence is a custom one rather than the Apache 2.0 that Qwen 3.5 and 3.6 shipped under: products with more than 100 million monthly users or $20 million in monthly revenue must display the model's name in their interface, and any model-as-a-service or AI work-assistant business earning more than $50 million over twelve months needs a separate licence from Qwen. The Qwen3.8-27B promised alongside it has not appeared on Qwen's official page. (Correction, 13 August: our original headline called this the largest open-weight model yet. It is not. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, with 2.8 trillion parameters, on 27 July. Qwen3.8-Max is the largest open-weight model Alibaba has published and the first Max-class Qwen opened, but not the largest overall.)

✓ Verified · 3 sources

Related stories