Holy, China strikes again: Qwen3.8-Max reportedly worked autonomously for 16 days while costing 80% less than GPT-5.6 Sol and 88% less than Claude Fable 5 on output. And its open weight!
Alibaba's 2.4T-parameter MoE costs $2/M input tokens and $6/M output tokens.
GPT-5.6 Sol: $5/$30. Claude Fable 5: $10/$50.
Qwen says the model operated autonomously for 16 days, producing 265 commits, 127 PRs and 151 issues through an issue -> code -> test -> repair -> merge loop.
It does not lead every benchmark. But it reaches the frontier range across coding, professional work and computer use, while PaperBench puts it ahead of both Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol at a very good pricing.
Open weights arrive next week.
A model that can economically work for ten days may be more useful than a better model you can afford to run for ten minutes.
Ngl another insane china release.