Alibaba Group shares climbed 6 per cent on Monday after the Chinese technology giant unveiled Qwen 3.8-MAX, the latest version of its flagship artificial intelligence model, as competition in China’s rapidly evolving AI sector continues to intensify.
The company’s Hong Kong-listed shares rose to HK$124.00 (US$16) by 02:58 GMT following the announcement.
Alibaba said Qwen 3.8-MAX offers enhanced reasoning, coding, agent capabilities and multimodal understanding, while lowering inference costs compared with previous versions.
The model, built on the Qwen 3.5 architecture, contains 2.4 trillion parameters with 95 billion active parameters. Alibaba said it will become the first Max-class Qwen model to have its weights released as open source when it becomes available next week.
The company said internal benchmark tests showed Qwen 3.8-MAX was broadly competitive with leading AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. It outperformed the U.S. models across several coding, multimodal and engineering benchmarks, although it trailed them on some general-purpose reasoning tasks.
The launch marks Alibaba’s latest effort to strengthen its position in the global AI race, where Chinese technology firms are rapidly expanding their capabilities to compete with both domestic rivals and leading US developers.
Alibaba is investing heavily in artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure to challenge competitors including DeepSeek, Baidu and Tencent. In May, the company said it would exceed its previously announced investment plan of up to 380 billion yuan (US$55.96 billion) in AI over the next three years.
The latest model release comes amid an accelerating wave of AI innovation in China following the emergence of DeepSeek’s low-cost reasoning models, which have intensified competition and prompted major technology companies to speed up the rollout of increasingly powerful generative AI systems.
