// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
China’s Alibaba takes another swipe at America’s AI supremacy
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Alibaba says its latest model can compete with Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.
Alibaba says its latest model can compete with Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.
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Chinese tech giant Alibaba released what it says is its largest and “most capable AI model to date,” claiming performance rivaling the best systems from US frontier labs Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as domestic rivals like Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. Alibaba said it was making the model, Qwen3.8-Max, widely available to users in a blog post published on Monday. The release had been expected after the company previewed the model last month, when it claimed it was “second only to Fable 5,” Anthropic’s flagship.
The open release of another highly capable Chinese AI model adds to sky-high tensions along multiple fronts in Silicon Valley and Washington over how to safely manage AI systems and retain the US’ technological edge over China.
Results from Alibaba’s own testing shared on Monday suggests it’s as powerful as claimed, as does its ranking on crowdsourced model-comparison platform Arena.AI. Alibaba’s own testing shows the model’s performance to broadly match — and sometimes exceed — that of Fable 5 on benchmark tests. On the Arena text model leaderboard, Qwen3.8-Max trails only Fable 5 and three models in Anthropic’s Opus family. For frontend coding, it is beaten only by two Claude Opus models and Kimi K3, and for visual analysis, only Fable 5 trounces it.