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2026/8/3 22:44 (UTC+8) · New Model · Alibaba 🚀 Qwen3.8-Max is live at $1.65/$4.95 per 1M tokens — 17.5％ below official Alibaba Qwen’s new flagship, released August 3 and listed the same day. A 2.4T-parameter sparse MoE with 1M context + 131K max output + 262K max thinking budget, with native image and video input. Official benchmarks: GPQA Diamond 92.6, PaperBench 93.0, Terminal-Bench 2.1 86.6, SWE-bench Pro 67.7, and FrontierSWE rising from the previous generation’s 40.7 to 73.5 — this generation’s gains are in agentic and multimodal work rather than raw reasoning scores. On pricing: $1.65 input, $4.95 output, $0.20625 cache read, $2.0625 cache write (per 1M tokens). Alibaba Cloud lists $2/$6, so this is 17.5％ lower, and top-up promotions stack on top. We ran 586 live calls before launch. Current endpoint status:
  • /v1/chat/completions: fully working — tool calling, structured output, multimodal, and streaming all verified
  • /v1/messages: usable for code integration, provided you strip thinking blocks before replaying history; off-the-shelf clients such as Claude Code cannot have their replay behavior changed and are not usable yet
  • /v1/responses: not supported yet, reported upstream
Three integration caveats. First, thinking is on by default (at the xhigh tier) — for everyday chat, set reasoning_effort="none" explicitly; in testing this took output from roughly 158 tokens down to 5. Second, max_tokens does not bound thinking tokens — we set max_tokens=1 and were still billed 1,054 output tokens, so use reasoning_effort to control cost. Third, forcing a call via tool_choice or requesting n > 1 requires reasoning_effort="none" alongside it, otherwise you get a 400 or the parameter is silently ignored. Full capability matrix, benchmark data, and code samples: Qwen3.8-Max launch notes.
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