Disclosure: I run NovAI, an API gateway that serves Qwen3.8-Max alongside 40+ other models. Specs below are from Alibaba's announcement; you can verify pricing yourself. Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen3.8-Max-Preview on 19 July 2026 at WA...
Disclosure: I run NovAI, an API gateway that serves Qwen3.8-Max alongside 40+ other models. Specs below are from Alibaba's announcement; you can verify pricing yourself.
Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen3.8-Max-Preview on 19 July 2026 at WAIC Shanghai: a 2.4-trillion-parameter sparse-MoE model, natively multimodal (text + images + video + documents), with a 128K context window (extendable to 1M). Alibaba called it "second only to Fable 5" — and early independent testing puts it in the top tier for coding and reasoning.
It's now available through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. If you already use the OpenAI SDK, it's a two-line change.
TL;DR
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key="YOUR_KEY",
base_url="https://aiapi-pro.com/v1",
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="qwen3.8-max",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain sparse MoE routing in 3 bullet points."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)
Streaming works exactly as you'd expect:
for chunk in client.chat.completions.create(
model="qwen3.8-max",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a haiku about trillion-parameter models."}],
stream=True,
):
print(chunk.choices[0].delta.content or "", end="", flush=True)
Multimodal: images and documents
Qwen3.8-Max is natively multimodal — vision is built in, not bolted on. Send an image with the standard image_url content type:
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="qwen3.8-max",
messages=[{
"role": "user",
"content": [
{"type": "text", "text": "What's in this screenshot? List all UI elements."},
{"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://example.com/ui.png"}},
],
}],
)
It also accepts PDF, HTML, and Markdown directly — no pre-processing to plain text needed.
Why Qwen3.8-Max matters
Spec
Value
Total parameters
2.4T (sparse MoE)
Modality
Text, images, video, documents
Context window
128K standard (1M extended)
API protocol
OpenAI + Anthropic compatible
Open weights
Promised "soon" (no date yet)
An independent reviewer (Thomas Wiegold) ran it through 4 coding tests — including a full Go poker simulation that only Fable 5 and Grok 4.5 had previously one-shotted. Qwen3.8-Max became the third model to do it. His takeaway: "very good and very slow" — the model spends extensive time on self-verification, which trades speed for thoroughness.
Pricing
Alibaba's official rate for Qwen3.8-Max is ¥12 / ¥36 per million tokens (input / output) — roughly $1.67 / $5.00. During the preview period, Alibaba offers it at 1/10th of standard rate (¥1.2 / ¥3.6, ~$0.17 / $0.50), with overnight rates as low as 1/50th (22:00–08:00 UTC+8).
NovAI passes these preview savings through. Check live per-token pricing: https://aiapi-pro.com/pricing
New keys come with $2 free credit, no credit card, so you can test Qwen3.8-Max against your own prompts before spending anything.
Try it
Copy-paste examples in Python, Node, and curl (chat, streaming, vision, long context) are on GitHub:
👉 https://github.com/vvvvking/novai-examples
Full guide with curl + Node snippets and FAQ: Qwen3.8-Max API Guide. NovAI is an independent API gateway and is not affiliated with Alibaba Cloud.