The U.S. restricted chips to slow China’s AI, and Alibaba just showed how little it has worked

Alibaba has unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, its most ambitious AI model yet, with 2.4 trillion parameters, a 1-million-token context window, and a Mixture-of-Experts design.

The company says internal tests show the model can match or come close to top U.S. lab systems on selected benchmarks.

Alibaba also plans to release weights for smaller versions next week, which could broaden enterprise and local adoption.

The launch underscores that U.S. chip restrictions have not decisively slowed Chinese AI progress, sharpening the China-U.S. AI rivalry.