Are these latest Qwen models still open weights or has Qwen moved away from that?

Lmao I love their video with the idea that people will be able to do their hobbies while ai does their job.

Surely Alibaba is leading by example here by reducing work hours per week while keeping pay the same right? Right?

> Today, we are officially releasing Qwen 3.8-Max, the most capable model in the Qwen family to date. This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week.

I don't understand. That's dated today, but:

https://twitter.com/alibaba_qwen/status/2078759124914098291

> Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon! [...] You don't have to wait to test it. Just now, the Qwen3.8-Max-Preview made its debut on Alibaba’s Token Plan, Qoder, and QoderWork.

That was on July 19th. I used it to draw this pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/afraid-of-chinese-mode...

So what are they releasing today?

They've also announced Qwen3.8-27B being released open-weight next week. Qwen3.6-27B is widely regarded as one of the best local models, especially since nothing else comes close to it, that isn't benchmaxxed, without being significantly larger. If 3.8 truly improves upon it that would be awesome.

It seems this is the only mention of cost?

> Qwen3.8-Max comes with the official support for reasoning_effort, which can be used to adjust reasoning depth and control cost:

> * xhigh (default): for complex tasks demanding thorough analysis*

> * medium: balancing accuracy and speed*

> * low: efficient reasoning optimizing for speed and cost*

I hope this is significantly cheaper. I've been loving Deepseek for it's nearly free usage costs, hard to justify switching from cents per day.

> This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week.

Nice!