Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max targets Fable 5 while Anthropic feud burns
Alibaba previewed Qwen 3.8 Max on July 20 and claimed it trails only Anthropic’s Fable 5 among leading AI systems. BABA shares rose as much as 5.4% in Hong Kong trading on the news, according to Bloomberg. The timing is striking: Alibaba banned employees from using Claude Code just ten days earlier, on July 10, after finding code capable of detecting whether a user was based in China.
The Anthropic dispute running underneath
The ban came alongside a separate accusation from Anthropic, which told the U.S. Senate Banking Committee that operators tied to Alibaba’s Qwen lab ran roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract Claude’s outputs through a technique called distillation. Alibaba pushed staff toward its own coding platform, Qoder, as a replacement. Qwen 3.8 Max is now hosted on that same platform, meaning the internal Claude Code substitute is also Alibaba’s public benchmark challenger.
A benchmark claim every Chinese lab is making
Alibaba is the third Chinese lab in quick succession to position a model as the closest rival to Fable 5. Zhipu AI’s GLM 5.2 landed within a percentage point of Opus 4.8 on a closely watched benchmark in June, at a fraction of the cost. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, released July 17 with 2.8 trillion parameters, made the same pitch three days before Alibaba’s announcement and briefly rattled global tech stocks. Moonshot has reportedly told investors it plans to go public in as little as six months.
None of these rankings comes from an independent benchmark. Alibaba has not published a model card or a benchmark table for Qwen 3.8 Max. The claim of trailing only Fable 5 rests entirely on internal testing, the same position every Chinese challenger has taken this year.
Open weights as a hedge against access risk
Alibaba has promised Qwen 3.8 will ship as an open weight model, though no date has been set. The pitch matters because Washington briefly cut off foreign access to Fable 5 and its sibling Mythos in June before partially restoring it in July. A downloadable model cannot be switched off by an export order, and Chinese labs have started marketing that difference as much as raw performance numbers.
Alibaba’s stake in both sides of the race
Alibaba holds roughly 36% of Moonshot AI, giving it financial exposure to both companies racing to become the default open alternative to Fable 5. Monday’s rally is therefore less a win over an outside rival and more a scenario where one Alibaba-backed company outperforms another, letting BABA capture upside either way.
Elsewhere in the sector, MiniMax fell 6% on Monday while Zhipu AI (Z.AI) dropped as much as 15%, on top of a 28% plunge in the prior session. Goldman Sachs analyst Ronald Keung named Alibaba a top pick among cloud developers, citing rising hyperscaler spending on AI infrastructure that benefits the company regardless of which model wins the benchmark race. Moonshot had to halt new user sign-ups on Sunday to manage server strain from demand following the Kimi K3 launch.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.
