Alibaba's new Qwen AI claims to match unsupervised working skills touted by Claude
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.
Published on 03/08/2026 - 10:32 GMT+2
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.
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".
The claim echoes how Anthropic's own top model, Claude Fable 5, has been described in the coverage of its release.
According to the company, 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.
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.
Similar claims from a US rival
Anthropic is making similar claims about its own AI. Its Claude Code tool can read software, plan out fixes and test its own work with little human input.
The company's newest model, Claude Opus 5, launched on 24 July, is built to run unsupervised for long stretches and Anthropic says it handles unfamiliar problems far better than earlier versions.
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.
Neither company's figures have been verified by independent researchers, and both are presenting results that reflect well on their own products.
Why it matters
The release is the clearest sign yet that China and the United States are now racing each other on the same track.
Washington has spent the past two years restricting the export of advanced chips to Chinese AI firms, aiming to keep companies such as Alibaba a generation behind.
Alibaba's answer, in effect, is to show it is not behind at all and to go further than its US rivals by making Qwen3.8-Max's weights freely available, inviting the world to check its claims rather than take them on trust.
Investors and governments alike are watching for signs of how far apart Chinese and American AI development actually remains.
