Anthropic Says the House Is on Fire. China Says AI Will Set You Free

Alibaba says it has introduced Qwen3.8-Max, a new AI model it calls its most powerful to date, while positioning China as closing the gap with U.S. leaders. The model has 2.4 trillion parameters and is designed for long-horizon “agentic” tasks that can run for days with minimal human involvement. In an internal test, it reportedly worked autonomously for about 125 hours to reproduce an experiment from a research paper, generating code, running the experiment, and reporting results. Alibaba claims Qwen3.8-Max is neck-and-neck with OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Fable 5 on multiple benchmarks and leads on two, covering visual reasoning and agentic computer use. It will release with open weights next week. The article also notes price comparisons, including Qwen’s lower token costs, and highlights U.S. concerns reflected in an Anthropic World Cup ad aimed at addressing fears about AI’s risks.