Alibaba Drops Qwen3.8-27B Open Weights Under Apache 2.0 — 27.78B Params, 262K Native Context, Text+Image+Video

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Alibaba's Qwen team published the Qwen3.8-27B weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope on August 14, 2026 at 15:00 UTC, under Apache 2.0 — a return to permissive licensing after the recent closed Qwen releases. The checkpoint is a 27.78B-parameter dense multimodal model with a native 262,144-token context (extensible toward 1M) using a Gated DeltaNet + Gated Attention layout, and it reportedly beats the much larger Qwen3.7-Plus on coding and office tasks. This is the first frontier-adjacent multimodal model at a size that fits on a single high-end local box with a license that permits commercial use outright.