Alibaba's new AI claims to match Claude, upping the US-China AI race

EuroNews · 🇫🇷 public France · Aug 03, 2026 · 408 words · By Una Hajdari

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Daily briefing

What to know about Alibaba's new AI claims to match Claude, upping the US-China AI race

Alibaba's Qwen team says its newest model can design a computer chip and rewrite a research paper — all without a human watching over it, matching skills its rival Anthropic already claims for Claude.

Claims checked 9

Techniques found 0

Topics 0

Coverage spectrum

Coverage gap: Low Left coverage

Left0%

Center75%

Right25%

4 sources compared across this story cluster. This is an eFinder estimate from indexed source coverage, not an editorial rating.

What happened

Why it matters

Chinese tech giant Alibaba says its newest AI model can work alone, unsupervised, for days on end and still deliver results, a feat claimed almost exclusively, until now, by its American rival Anthropic.

Common ground

The model, Qwen3.8-Max, was announced in a post by the Qwen team on Monday, which says it delivers "comprehensive improvements across coding, work, research, and long-horizon tasks".

Perspective signals

No major persuasion pattern has been attached yet, so the source, headline, and evidence should carry most of the weight for readers.

Follow-up questions

What concrete event or decision sits underneath the headline: Alibaba's new AI claims to match Claude, upping the US-China AI race?
What evidence would most clearly confirm or weaken the claim that one test saw the model work 'completely on its own for about five days or 125 hours of continuous effort,' rebuilding a maths research paper's experiment from scratch and then improving on it?
What should readers watch for in the next update to know whether the story is changing?

open_in_new Read the original article: https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/08/03/alibabas-new-qwen-ai-claims-to-match-un…

fact_checkClaims Checked

eFinder analyzed this article and checked 9 claims against available evidence, cross-references, web search, and Wikipedia. Here is what the fact-checking layer found.

check_circle Corroborated 5

info Single Source 4

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Claim 1: “one test saw the model work 'completely on its own for about five days or 125 hours of continuous effort,' rebuilding a maths research paper's experiment from scratch and then improving on it.”

SINGLE SOURCE

The specific detail about working for 125 hours to rebuild a maths research paper is not corroborated by multiple independent sources in the provided evidence; it appears as a specific claim attributed to Alibaba in the context of the article being checked.

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Open-source artificial intelligence, as defined by the Open Source Initiative, is an AI system that is freely available to use, study, modify, and share. This includes datasets used to train the model…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_artificial_intelli…

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web search NEUTRAL — On 28 June 1999, [1] Jack Ma, with 17 friends and students founded Alibaba.com, a China-based B2B marketplace site, in his Hangzhou apartment. In October 1999, Alibaba received a US$25 million investm…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group

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web search NEUTRAL — Find quality Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters, Importers, Buyers, Wholesalers, Products and Trade Leads from our award-winning International Trade Site. Import & Export on alibaba.com
https://www.alibaba.com/

+ 1 more evidence source

info

Claim 2: “Alibaba's Qwen team says its newest model can design a computer chip and rewrite a research paper — all without a human watching over it”

SINGLE SOURCE

While web results confirm the existence of Qwen3.8-Max and its capabilities in long-horizon tasks, the specific claim about designing a computer chip and rewriting a research paper without human supervision is only explicitly mentioned in one of the provided search snippets ('Alibaba's new Qwen AI claims to match unsupervised working skills...').

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and dec…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Manus (meaning hand in Latin) is an autonomous artificial intelligence agent developed by Butterfly Effect, a company founded in China and based in Singapore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen models are distributed under the free and open-sou…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen

+ 3 more evidence sources

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Claim 3: “The model, Qwen3.8-Max, was announced in a post by the Qwen team on Monday”

CORROBORATED

Multiple sources confirm the announcement of Qwen3.8-Max, including a YouTube analysis and a news snippet regarding its launch and parameters.

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web search NEUTRAL — Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud. Many Qwen models are distributed under the free and open-sou…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen

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web search NEUTRAL — Qwen Studio is an AI assistant for everyone, powered by the Qwen series models. It’s free to use, open to all, and ready to help with creativity, collaboration, and endless possibilities.
https://qwen.ai/home

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web search NEUTRAL — Qwen Studio is an official platform from Qwen that empowers both everyday users and developers with unified access to Qwen’s series of open-source and proprietary models. It offers comprehensive funct…
https://chat.qwen.ai/

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Claim 4: “making Qwen3.8-Max's weights freely available”

CORROBORATED

One source explicitly states that Qwen3.8-Max is 'open-weight' and that weights are set to go live on Hugging Face and ModelScope.

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Claim 5: “In a separate test, Qwen said the model was entered into a live online contest against 526 human teams and, working to a 24-hour deadline, beat all but 68 of them.”

SINGLE SOURCE

The specific statistics regarding the online contest (526 teams, beating all but 68) are not found in the provided independent evidence snippets.

travel_explore

web search NEUTRAL — Alibaba Cloud launches Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters, matching Anthropic Fable 5 on key benchmarks at 40% of the input cost — reshaping global AI competition in 2026.
https://chinabizinsider.com/alibabas-qwen3-8-max-challenge-h…

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web search NEUTRAL — Alibaba's Qwen team has unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, its most capable language model to date.Qwen3.8-Max is available now through QwenCloud. The weights are set to go live on Hugging Face and ModelScope next…
https://the-decoder.com/alibabas-open-weight-qwen3-8-max-tak…

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web search NEUTRAL — Alibaba dropped Qwen 3.8 Max in preview, a 2.4 TRILLION parameter model, and claimed it's second only to Claude Fable 5. That is an enormous claim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buK50XBgoOs

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Claim 6: “Washington has spent the past two years restricting the export of advanced chips to Chinese AI firms”

CORROBORATED

Multiple sources (Vox, Time, FSI) confirm that the US government (both Trump and Biden administrations) has implemented export controls on advanced AI chips to China.

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web search NEUTRAL — Policymakers have worried for years now about China gaining an edge over the US in the AI race. Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations took steps to slow China’s AI progress, including bl…
https://www.vox.com/politics/497534/chinese-ai-moonshot-kimi…

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web search NEUTRAL — PM UTC The Biden administration has announced it is tightening export controls on semiconductor chips used for artificial intelligence and the equipment used to manufacture them, in an effort to preve…
https://time.com/6324619/us-biden-ai-chips-china/

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web search NEUTRAL — Despite recent advances by Chinese semiconductor firms on the hardware side, export controls on advanced AI chips and related manufacturing technologies have proven to be an effective deterrent. Final…
https://cyber-fsi-stanford-edu.nproxy.org/publication/taking…

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Claim 7: “Its Claude Code tool can read software, plan out fixes and test its own work with little human input.”

CORROBORATED

The existence and function of Claude Code as an agentic tool that reads software and plans fixes is confirmed by both Anthropic's official product page and a news snippet.

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Anthropic, PBC is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded with the goal of promoting AI safety. Its flagship product is …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Claude is a series of large language models developed by American software company Anthropic. Claude was released as an AI-based chatbot in March 2023. It is also used in AI-assisted software developm…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(AI)

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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Claude Mythos is a series of large language models developed by Anthropic. It is the most powerful series of models in the Claude family. The first model in the series was Claude Mythos Preview. Anthr…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Mythos

+ 3 more evidence sources

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Claim 8: “The company's newest model, Claude Opus 5, launched on 24 July”

CORROBORATED

Three independent web sources explicitly state that Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026.

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+ 3 more evidence sources

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Claim 9: “Anthropic also sells Claude Cowork, designed for people to hand off longer jobs, such as research, spreadsheets and first drafts, for the AI to finish largely on its own.”

SINGLE SOURCE

The provided evidence for Anthropic and Claude mentions general capabilities and the Claude Code tool, but there is no mention of a product specifically called 'Claude Cowork'.

travel_explore

web search NEUTRAL — Anthropic, PBC[8][9] is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded with the goal of promoting AI safety. [10] Its flagship …
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic

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web search NEUTRAL — Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
https://www.anthropic.com/

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web search NEUTRAL — Claude is a next generation AI assistant built by Anthropic and trained to be safe, accurate, and secure to help you do your best work.
https://claude.com/

info Disclaimer: This analysis is generated by AI and should be used as a starting point for critical thinking, not as definitive truth. Claims are verified against publicly available sources. Always consult the original article and additional sources for complete context.