Alibaba shares rose on Monday after the company previewed a new artificial intelligence model over the weekend. The company is presenting this model as a direct competitor to Anthropic’s top systems.
American depositary receipts went up 3.3% in premarket trading on Monday. This follows a 2.1% drop at the close on Friday.
On Sunday, Alibaba shared a preview of its new large language model, Qwen3.8 Max, on social media. The model is available on the company’s coding platforms and can handle text, images, video, and documents. According to Alibaba, Qwen3.8 Max has 2.4 trillion parameters, which shows how much information it can store. The company described it as one of the most powerful models available, ranking just behind Anthropic’s Fable 5 among advanced systems. Fable 5 belongs to Anthropic’s higher-tier Mythos model family.
This announcement came after Chinese AI start-up Moonshot launched its Kimi K3 model, which has 2.8 trillion parameters. More Chinese AI developers are now competing directly with Anthropic and OpenAI. These recent announcements happened as chip stocks and other AI-related companies fell last week, showing that investors may be shifting away from AI infrastructure stocks.
Citi Research said these developments show that the AI race in China is speeding up, with companies quickly overtaking each other. The firm also noted that this fast pace could lead to a more model-agnostic industry, where businesses use several models to pick the best one for each job. This change would make it harder for any single model to stand out and would put more focus on the platforms and infrastructure that support them. Citi said this trend could help Alibaba become a long-term leader in the field.
These changes show that competition in the AI model market is heating up, especially with expected public offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. Some investors may see Alibaba as a way to invest in large language model development. Alibaba shares are still down 22% for the year, but they have gone up nearly 20% this month. The stock has been recovering toward its 50-day moving average after hitting a low on June 26 and rising steadily since then.
