BABA Stock Jumps Overnight: Alibaba Says Its New AI Model Can Go Toe-To-Toe With Anthropic

• Chinese companies are rolling out frontier AI models that feature open weights and significantly lower costs.
• Alibaba shared results showing its Qwen3.8-Max AI model delivering comparable or sometimes better scores than Anthropic’s Fable 5.
• Retail sentiment for BABA was ‘bullish’ on Monday.

Alibaba Group Holding’s stock rose more than 4% in overnight trading ahead of Monday after the Chinese tech giant unveiled its latest AI model, which it said delivers performance on par with leading U.S. AI systems such as Anthropic’s Fable.

Alibaba said its Qwen3.8-Max is built around 2.4 trillion parameters and ranks higher on several benchmarks than the headline-grabbing Kimi K3 from Moonshot that was recently unveiled. 

Alibaba shared results showing it delivering comparable, or sometimes better, scores than Anthropic’s Fable 5, one of Anthropic's most advanced models, which is built on the Mythos platform.

Alibaba’s shares surged by as much as 7.3%, the most in nearly a month, in Hong Kong on Monday.

Alibaba said it made Qwen3.8-Max widely accessible to global users ahead of an open-weights release next week. The company also said the model could recreate software applications from screenshots, generate interactive games and educational animations, and convert two-dimensional floor plans into 3D visualizations.

China Pushes AI Frontiers

Qwen3.8-Max’s release is the latest in a flurry of AI launches from China that has put the U.S. AI industry on high alert.

Last week, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek made the official beta version of its latest V4 Flash model publicly available. The V4 models are powerful and cost far less than the leading U.S. models.

Last month, Moonshot AI introduced the Kimi K3 AI model, which triggered a selloff in certain pockets of the U.S. market, and many herald it as a mini DeepSeek moment.

Tech giants are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the computing infrastructure powering the AI revolution. Yet the intelligence that infrastructure produces is getting cheaper by the week, a concerning signal for cloud companies and chipmakers whose business has flourished due to surging demand for cloud computing.

With Chinese models bearing down on the U.S. market, July ushered in a full-scale price war across the AI landscape. OpenAI slashed the price of GPT-5.6 Luna, its fastest, and cheapest model for high-volume tasks, by 80% last week, only three weeks after its launch, and Google released three new Gemini "flash" models all focused on efficiency.

Retail View On BABA

BABA stock, which has been under pressure for most of 2026, is seeing fresh momentum. Shares had gained 33% from a recent low on June 26.

On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment for BABA was ‘bullish,’ unchanged from the previous day. “Shares could receive light upward price pressure as the launch strengthens perceptions of Alibaba's AI competitiveness, although the lack of commercial evidence limits the likely repricing,” a trader wrote.

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