Two weeks after a Beijing startup called Moonshot AI unsettled the US AI industry with a model named Kimi K3, Alibaba has answered with its own. On 3 August, the company behind AliExpress and Alibaba Cloud released Qwen3.8-Max, its largest and most capable AI model so far. What Qwen3.8-Max actually isQwen is Alibaba’s family of AI models, the way GPT is OpenAI’s and Claude is Anthropic’s. Why this follows Kimi K3, and why Alibaba is in an odd positionThis is the second Chinese frontier model in three weeks. On 16 July, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open model it billed as the largest open-source model in the world.