Qwen
Verdict
Evidence: Editorial assessmentQwen3.8 is the most significant open-weight release of August 2026: Alibaba published a 2.4T-parameter mixture-of-experts flagship and a 27B model. It suits teams that want frontier-class open weights and can run very large models or use a host. Check the licence file shipped with each model before commercial use.
Quick facts
| Qwen | |
|---|---|
| Maker | Alibaba (Qwen team) |
| Category | AI Models & Open-Weight LLMs |
| Pricing model | Open weights |
| Status | Active |
| Official site | github.com |
| Data last checked | 5 October 2026 |
Key facts and sources
| Claim | Detail | Evidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Release and open weights | Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B (12 August 2026, mixture-of-experts with 95B active parameters) and Qwen3.8-27B (14 August 2026) as open weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope. Deployment examples use a 262,144-token context. Model licences are published with the weights. | Verified | QwenLM/Qwen3.8 on GitHub, 5 October 2026 |
Pricing
No prices are shown because we have not confirmed them on Qwen's own pricing page. Go to Qwen
Who should use it
- Self-hosting a frontier-class open model
- Teams that need a smaller 27B model with the same family behaviour
Who should skip it
- You cannot host very large models and do not want a third-party host
Limitations and risks
- The 2.4T model needs substantial hardware.
- Licence terms are published per model on Hugging Face / ModelScope.
How it compares: Qwen alternatives
Kimi
Moonshot AI's Kimi models; Kimi K3 is a 2.8T-parameter open-weight model with native vision and a 1M-token context window.
DeepSeek
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's open-weight language models, released under the MIT licence, plus a chat app and API.
gpt-oss
OpenAI's open-weight reasoning models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, released under the Apache 2.0 licence.
Gemma
Google DeepMind's family of open-weight language models; Gemma 3n is the mobile-first member and Gemma 4 is the newest generation.
Llama 2
Meta's 2023 open-weight language model family. It is a legacy release, superseded by newer Llama and other open-weight models.
Rating
Not yet rated. We show a rating only when at least four of six criteria have documented evidence. How we rate AI tools
Common questions
Is Qwen3.8 open source?
Qwen3.8 is released as open weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope; the licence for each model is in the files released with the weights. The Qwen GitHub repository itself uses Apache-2.0.
When was Qwen3.8 released?
Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on 12 August 2026 and Qwen3.8-27B on 14 August 2026, according to the QwenLM repository.
Sources
- QwenLM/Qwen3.8 on GitHub · checked 5 October 2026