Qwen3.8-Max
Overview
Qwen3.8-Max is Alibaba's flagship Qwen model for coding, professional knowledge work, multimodal understanding, and long-horizon agent tasks. It was officially released on August 3, 2026, with the API model ID qwen3.8-max. The model uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 2.4 trillion total parameters and 95 billion activated parameters, accepts text, image, and video input, and produces text output.
Key Features
- 2.4T-Parameter MoE Architecture: Built on the Qwen3.5 architectural foundation with 2.4 trillion total parameters and 95 billion activated parameters per token.
- Native Multimodal Intelligence: Processes text, images, and video in the same model. Qwen describes vision as part of an agent's planning, execution, and self-correction loop rather than a separate preprocessing step.
- 1M-Token Context: Provides a 1-million-token context window, with up to 991.80K input tokens in non-thinking mode, 983.61K input tokens in thinking mode, and 131.07K output tokens.
- Configurable Reasoning: Thinking is enabled by default. The API supports
low,medium, andxhighreasoning effort, withxhighas the default, and preserves reasoning across turns by default. - Long-Horizon Agent Work: The launch report documents autonomous coding, research, chip-design optimization, and year-long business-simulation tasks. In one coding case, the model operated for about 16 days and produced 265 commits, 127 pull requests, and 151 issues without human intervention.
- Agent and API Integration: Supports Function Calling, structured output, prefix completion, batch inference, context caching, and built-in tools. It can be accessed through OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions and Responses APIs, Anthropic-compatible APIs, or DashScope.
Best Use Cases
- Autonomous Software Engineering: Multi-day implementation, repository maintenance, testing, debugging, and iterative delivery using coding agents.
- Research and Experimentation: Reproducing papers, writing experimental pipelines, running iterative evaluations, and refining hypotheses with tools.
- Professional Knowledge Work: Legal review, financial analysis, document production, data analysis, design prototyping, and other multi-step office workflows.
- Long-Horizon Planning and Optimization: Tasks that require hundreds of feedback cycles, persistent state, adaptive planning, and repeated verification.
- Multimodal Agents: Workflows that combine documents, screenshots, images, video, code execution, search, and external tools.
Capabilities and Limitations
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Reasoning | Thinking is enabled by default. reasoning_effort supports low, medium, and xhigh; xhigh is the default. The maximum mapped thinking budget is 262,144 tokens, while the default budget is 131,072. |
| Coding | Designed for autonomous, long-horizon coding. Qwen reports 86.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 67.7 on SWE-bench Pro, 73.5 on FrontierSWE, and 93.0 on PaperBench. |
| Multimodal | Accepts text, image, and video input and produces text output. |
| Context Window | 1M tokens. |
| Maximum Input | 991.80K tokens in non-thinking mode and 983.61K tokens in thinking mode. |
| Max Output | 131.07K tokens in both modes. |
| Structured Output | Supported. |
| Architecture | Mixture-of-Experts architecture based on Qwen3.5. |
| Total Parameters | 2.4 trillion. |
| Activated Parameters | 95 billion. |
| Knowledge Cutoff | Unpublished. |
Known Limitations
- Preserved thinking is enabled by default. Multi-turn clients must return the complete, unmodified
reasoning_contenthistory; preserved reasoning also counts toward input tokens and billing. - Alibaba has not published a model-specific knowledge cutoff, measured generation speed, or complete language-coverage list.
Pricing
| Model | Input (Credits/Token) | Cache Write (Credits/Token) | Cache Read (Credits/Token) | Output (Credits/Token) | Web Search (Credits/Use) | Billing Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8-Max | 2.00 | 2.00 | 0.25 | 6.00 | - | Cache Read uses the official implicit-cache price. |
Pricing note
Prices shown in the documentation are B.AI standard reference prices for base billing purposes. B.AI may provide lower actual usage costs through top-up bonuses and account benefits. Specific prices, bonus Credits, and account benefits are subject to the platform display and final billing records.