Qwen3.8 Max 0902: pricing, context and performance

What you need to know

Qwen3.8 Max 0902 is a language model from Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), released on September 2, 2026. It is a very recent release. Its weights are not published, so it only runs remotely, through the Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) API or partner hosts (9 listed on models.dev). It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money.

We file it under frontier models (24 models in this category on the site).

Measured performance

According to results published by Epoch AI (checked on October 22, 2026), Qwen3.8 Max 0902 has a capability index of 88.4 out of 100, computed on 3 benchmarks from our basket.

With only 3 benchmarks reported, it does not enter the public ranking, which requires at least 4 results, so its index should be read as partial.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 92.3% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): 100% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5 Pro, reaches 100%
• FrontierMath (very hard research-level mathematics): 65.6% — the best tracked model, GPT-6 Astra, reaches 93.7%

Pricing and budget

Qwen3.8 Max 0902 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens (median of 9 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.052, or $52 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is 2.4 times cheaper than the median output price of frontier models ($14.5).

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

Technical specifications

Its context window reaches 1,000,000 tokens, roughly 1,500 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough to load a whole book or a mid-sized codebase. A single answer can run to 50,000 tokens.

It accepts as input: text, image, video and PDF.

It can call tools (functions, APIs), which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

When to choose it

Given its category, Qwen3.8 Max 0902 is mainly aimed at hard tasks where quality matters more than cost: deep reasoning, complex code, long analyses.

Its very large context window makes it worth considering for analysing large sets of documents in a single request.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

What could replace it?

In the same category, the models closest to Qwen3.8 Max 0902 are:

• GPT-5.5 (OpenAI, index 89) — see the comparison
• GPT-6 Sol (OpenAI, index 89.2) — see the comparison
• Gemini 3 Pro Preview (Google DeepMind, index 87)
• Qwen3.7 Max (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 86.6)