According to CNBC, Alibaba launched a new AI model designed to run on consumer hardware such as laptops and released the weights of its most powerful model, Qwen3.8 Max, as it seeks to maintain its lead in open-source technology. The company said Qwen3.8-27B has strong capabilities in coding, professional work, research and long-horizon agentic tasks, and said it matches the performance of another model that is 10 times larger. Alibaba said the weights of Qwen3.8 Max can be freely downloaded and run, although the data and methods used to train it may not be disclosed.

The move comes after Meta announced plans last week to open-source its most powerful AI model and launch new laptop-ready models. Hugging Face said last week that Qwen-based models now account for 151,448 derivatives, or downloads and uses of open-weight models, which it said is 2.6 times Meta's total footprint. Analysts said the competition in open-weight AI is increasingly centered on which company can offer the most capable models and on-device performance.