Qwen

3 entries between March 2026 and August 2026, 4 releases.

Every entry

  1. Alibaba announces Qwen3.8-Max, its largest model to date

    Alibaba announced Qwen3.8-Max on 3 August 2026 with 2.4 trillion parameters, about 95 billion active at a time through a sparse mixture of experts, a context window up to 1 million tokens, and native text, image and video input. Weights were scheduled to follow a week later.

  2. Alibaba splits Qwen into open and proprietary tiers

    Alibaba released Qwen3.6 in April 2026, a 35-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 3 billion active parameters, under the Apache 2.0 license. It kept the more capable Qwen3.6-Plus and Qwen3.5-Omni proprietary, reachable only through Qwen’s apps and Alibaba Cloud.

  3. Alibaba’s Qwen chief resigns and its AI work is consolidated

    Lin Junyang, head of Alibaba’s Qwen model division, resigned in early March 2026, shortly after the release of Qwen3.5. On 17 March Alibaba formed a new AI unit, Alibaba Token Hub, placing Qwen and related work under chief executive Eddie Wu.

Releases

Date Release Maker Kind What it was
2026
Qwen3.8-Max Alibaba model 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts model; weights scheduled for release the following week.
Qwen3.8-Max (preview) Alibaba model 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal model previewed at WAIC Shanghai.
Qwen3.6 Alibaba open-weights 35B total / 3B active mixture-of-experts model released under Apache 2.0, weights on Hugging Face.
Qwen3.6-Plus / Qwen3.5-Omni Alibaba model Proprietary flagship variants, access via Qwen apps and Alibaba Cloud only.