Product moves · Business
From the Aug 8, 2026 daily brief
Alibaba's official Qwen account announced Qwen3.8-Max on August 3, publishing official API pricing in three parts for the first time ($2.00 per million input tokens, $6.00 per million output tokens, $0.25 for implicit cache), and committed to opening the weights of Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B the following week (Alibaba Qwen official, August 3, 2026). Until now, information on this model came via two-hop relay; now there is the vendor's own statement and its own timeline. The price deserves its own entry because it is the only hard field you can compare directly across vendors — capability claims each talk their own book, but list prices are public; $6 per million output tokens on a "2.4T-parameter flagship" positioning is the most direct variable for judging how fast Chinese open-weight models spread, and considerably more useful than benchmark scores. ⚠️ None of the capability claims can be cited (vendor self-evaluation, no control group, no third-party replication). The cheapest action of the week: around August 10, check Hugging Face and ModelScope once — are the weights up, and what does the license say. Until the weights land, this remains a promise.
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