“Second only to Fable 5:” Alibaba talks the talk with Qwen3.8 without providing any real data

Alibaba has revealed Qwen 3.8, its latest, greatest large language model (LLM) which, it says, is among the most powerful models today.

More specifically, the company claimed in its announcement on Sunday that it’s “second only to Fable 5,” Anthropic’s much-hyped flagship model. However, the company provided no model card, benchmarks, or any other meaningful data points beyond that.

Notably, the announcement comes just days after rival Chinese AI firm Moonshot debuted Kimi K3, drawing plaudits for topping Arena’s coding leaderboard and rivaling systems from Anthropic and OpenAI on internal benchmarks, while securing impressive headlines on the BBC, Bloomberg, and other mainstream news outlets.

Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon!🌐

With a massive 2.4T parameters, this model is continuously evolving. We believe it’s one of the most powerful model available today, compatible to leading frontier AI models, second only to Fable 5.

You don't have to wait to… pic.twitter.com/JS3ID73IYS — Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen)July 19, 2026

While Moonshot has yet to release the K3 weights, it has already published a fairly substantial technical breakdown, complete with a full benchmark table against other leading systems, architecture details, and published pricing, with a July 27 date set for the open-weight release itself.

Alibaba, on the other hand, has largely relied on a single post on X to make its bold claims. On top of that, the message contained a couple of grammatical slip-ups, one of which seemingly conflated “compatible” with “comparable.”

While not hugely important in itself, it’s the kind of detail that might not instill much confidence in a launch meant to position the model as a genuine frontier contender.

Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon!🌐

With a massive 2.4T parameters, this model is continuously evolving. We believe it’s one of the most powerful model available today, compatible to leading frontier AI models, second only to Fable 5.

Y…