List of the Top Foundation Models for ModelScope in 2026

Qwen3.8-Max is a large-scale AI model from Qwen built for coding, coworking, research, long-horizon planning, and multimodal agent workflows. It is positioned as the most capable model in the Qwen family to date, with open weights announced for release after launch. The model uses a 2.4 trillion-parameter architecture with 95 billion active parameters and is available through QwenCloud. Qwen3.8-Max is designed to complete complex, open-ended goals end to end rather than only answer isolated prompts. In coding workflows, it can write and run code, create self-evolving harnesses, normalize requirements into issues, execute tasks through agents, run tests, trigger CI checks, and iterate through feedback. Its autonomous coding examples include a 10+ day project run, a research-paper reproduction and improvement loop, and a 24-hour online competition solution that beat most participating human teams. For professional work, Qwen3.8-Max is built to handle multi-step, tool-heavy workflows across compliance, design, food operations, engineering, rehabilitation, sports analytics, and quantitative research. The model also supports long-horizon decision-making, including autonomous chip-design optimization and extended e-commerce operations simulations. Its multimodal capabilities cover images, complex PDFs, long videos, visual production, interface inspection, frontend reconstruction, Blender visualization, interactive applications, and visual feedback loops. Qwen3.8-Max can be integrated through QwenCloud APIs and used with agent frameworks or coding assistants such as Claude Code, Codex, Qoder CLI, Qwen Code, and OpenClaw. By combining agentic coding, reasoning controls, multimodal understanding, visual self-correction, long-context workflows, tool use, and open-weight availability, Qwen3.8-Max helps developers and organizations build autonomous AI systems that can produce dependable deliverables.

Qwen is an advanced AI assistant and development platform powered by Alibaba Cloud’s cutting-edge Qwen model family, offering powerful multimodal reasoning and creativity tools for users at all skill levels. It provides a free and accessible interface through Qwen Chat, where anyone can generate images, analyze content, perform deep multi-step research, and build fully coded web pages simply by describing what they want. Using its VLo model, Qwen transforms ideas into detailed visuals and supports editing, style transfer, and complex multi-element image creation. Deep Research acts like an automated research partner, gathering information online, synthesizing insights, and generating structured reports in minutes. The Web Dev feature empowers users to create modern, ready-to-deploy websites with clean code using only natural language instructions. Qwen’s enhanced “Thinking” capabilities provide stronger logic, structured problem-solving, and real-time internet-aware analysis. Its Search tool retrieves precise results with contextual understanding, while multimodal intelligence enables Qwen to process images, audio, video, and text together for deeper comprehension. For developers, the Qwen API offers OpenAI-compatible endpoints, allowing seamless integration of Qwen’s reasoning, generation, and multimodal abilities into any application or product. This makes Qwen not only an AI assistant but also a versatile platform for builders and engineers. Across web, desktop, and mobile environments, Qwen delivers a unified, high-performance AI experience.

Qwen3.8-27B is an open-weights 27B-class model connected to Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 release, built for developers, researchers, and AI teams that need a capable but more deployable model size. Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 launch described the broader model family as optimized for coding and cowork scenarios, including software development, document processing, data analysis, and professional workflows. Reports state that Alibaba planned to open-source Qwen3.8-Max alongside Qwen3.8-27B, expanding access for developers and researchers. Qwen3.8-27B gives builders a smaller alternative to the 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max model, which third-party coverage describes as Qwen’s first Max-scale model planned for open weights. The model is well suited for coding assistance, local development, agent testing, workflow automation, data analysis, document understanding, and private AI experimentation. QwenCloud documentation lists Qwen3.8-Max as supporting a 1M context window, thinking, function calling, built-in tools, and structured output, showing the broader Qwen3.8 generation’s focus on advanced agent and application workflows. Qwen3.8-27B is especially useful for teams that want Qwen-family capabilities without the infrastructure demands of Max-scale deployment. Community posts around the release point to active interest in Hugging Face, Unsloth GGUF, Ollama, and local inference use cases. Third-party coverage also notes practical hardware discussions around quantized Qwen3.8-27B deployment, including claims that 4-bit variants can fit more easily on consumer or workstation GPUs. The model can be positioned for organizations that need open AI infrastructure, coding agents, local model evaluation, private deployments, and cost-controlled experimentation. By combining open-weight access, a practical 27B model size, Qwen3.8-era performance ambitions, coding-oriented workflows, and local deployment interest, Qwen3.8-27B gives developers a flexible foundation for building AI products and agents.

Qwen-7B represents the seventh iteration in Alibaba Cloud's Qwen language model lineup, also referred to as Tongyi Qianwen, featuring 7 billion parameters. This advanced language model employs a Transformer architecture and has undergone pretraining on a vast array of data, including web content, literature, programming code, and more. In addition, we have launched Qwen-7B-Chat, an AI assistant that enhances the pretrained Qwen-7B model by integrating sophisticated alignment techniques. The Qwen-7B series includes several remarkable attributes: Its training was conducted on a premium dataset encompassing over 2.2 trillion tokens collected from a custom assembly of high-quality texts and codes across diverse fields, covering both general and specialized areas of knowledge. Moreover, the model excels in performance, outshining similarly-sized competitors on various benchmark datasets that evaluate skills in natural language comprehension, mathematical reasoning, and programming challenges. This establishes Qwen-7B as a prominent contender in the AI language model landscape. In summary, its intricate training regimen and solid architecture contribute significantly to its outstanding adaptability and efficiency in a wide range of applications.

CodeQwen acts as the programming equivalent of Qwen, a collection of large language models developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. This model, which is based on a transformer architecture that operates purely as a decoder, has been rigorously pre-trained on an extensive dataset of code. It is known for its strong capabilities in code generation and has achieved remarkable results on various benchmarking assessments. CodeQwen can understand and generate long contexts of up to 64,000 tokens and supports 92 programming languages, excelling in tasks such as text-to-SQL queries and debugging operations. Interacting with CodeQwen is uncomplicated; users can start a dialogue with just a few lines of code leveraging transformers. The interaction is rooted in creating the tokenizer and model using pre-existing methods, utilizing the generate function to foster communication through the chat template specified by the tokenizer. Adhering to our established guidelines, we adopt the ChatML template specifically designed for chat models. This model efficiently completes code snippets according to the prompts it receives, providing responses that require no additional formatting changes, thereby significantly enhancing the user experience. The smooth integration of these components highlights the adaptability and effectiveness of CodeQwen in addressing a wide range of programming challenges, making it an invaluable tool for developers.

Qwen2 is a comprehensive array of advanced language models developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. This collection includes various models that range from base to instruction-tuned versions, with parameters from 0.5 billion up to an impressive 72 billion, demonstrating both dense configurations and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture. The Qwen2 lineup is designed to surpass many earlier open-weight models, including its predecessor Qwen1.5, while also competing effectively against proprietary models across several benchmarks in domains such as language understanding, text generation, multilingual capabilities, programming, mathematics, and logical reasoning. Additionally, this cutting-edge series is set to significantly influence the artificial intelligence landscape, providing enhanced functionalities that cater to a wide array of applications. As such, the Qwen2 models not only represent a leap in technological advancement but also pave the way for future innovations in the field.

Qwen2.5-Max is a cutting-edge Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model developed by the Qwen team, trained on a vast dataset of over 20 trillion tokens and improved through techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). It outperforms models like DeepSeek V3 in various evaluations, excelling in benchmarks such as Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond, and also achieving impressive results in tests like MMLU-Pro. Users can access this model via an API on Alibaba Cloud, which facilitates easy integration into various applications, and they can also engage with it directly on Qwen Chat for a more interactive experience. Furthermore, Qwen2.5-Max's advanced features and high performance mark a remarkable step forward in the evolution of AI technology. It not only enhances productivity but also opens new avenues for innovation in the field.

The Qwen2.5-VL represents a significant advancement in the Qwen vision-language model series, offering substantial enhancements over the earlier version, Qwen2-VL. This sophisticated model showcases remarkable skills in visual interpretation, capable of recognizing a wide variety of elements in images, including text, charts, and numerous graphical components. Acting as an interactive visual assistant, it possesses the ability to reason and adeptly utilize tools, making it ideal for applications that require interaction on both computers and mobile devices. Additionally, Qwen2.5-VL excels in analyzing lengthy videos, being able to pinpoint relevant segments within those that exceed one hour in duration. It also specializes in precisely identifying objects in images, providing bounding boxes or point annotations, and generates well-organized JSON outputs detailing coordinates and attributes. The model is designed to output structured data for various document types, such as scanned invoices, forms, and tables, which proves especially beneficial for sectors like finance and commerce. Available in both base and instruct configurations across 3B, 7B, and 72B models, Qwen2.5-VL is accessible on platforms like Hugging Face and ModelScope, broadening its availability for developers and researchers. Furthermore, this model not only enhances the realm of vision-language processing but also establishes a new benchmark for future innovations in this area, paving the way for even more sophisticated applications.

Step 3.5 Flash represents a state-of-the-art open-source foundational language model crafted for sophisticated reasoning and agent-like functionality, prioritizing efficiency; it employs a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework that activates roughly 11 billion of its nearly 196 billion parameters for each token, which ensures both dense intelligence and rapid responsiveness. The architecture includes a 3-way Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) system, enabling the generation of hundreds of tokens per second and supporting intricate multi-step reasoning and task execution, while efficiently handling extensive contexts through a hybrid sliding window attention technique that reduces computational stress on large datasets or codebases. Its remarkable capabilities in reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks often rival or exceed those of much larger proprietary models, further enhanced by a scalable reinforcement learning mechanism that promotes ongoing self-improvement. This innovative design not only highlights Step 3.5 Flash's effectiveness but also positions it as a transformative force in the domain of AI language models, indicating its vast potential across a plethora of applications. As such, it stands as a testament to the advancements in AI technology, paving the way for future developments.

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is part of the Qwen3.5 "Medium" model lineup, designed as an efficient multimodal foundation model that effectively balances strong reasoning skills with real-world application demands. It features a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, comprising 35 billion parameters but activating approximately 3 billion for each token, which allows it to deliver performance comparable to much larger models while significantly reducing computational costs. The model incorporates a hybrid attention mechanism that fuses linear attention with conventional attention layers, enhancing its capability to manage extensive context and improving scalability for complex tasks. As a vision-language model, it adeptly processes both text and visual inputs, catering to a wide range of applications such as multimodal reasoning, programming, and automated workflows. Additionally, it is designed to function as a flexible "AI agent," skilled in planning, tool utilization, and systematic problem-solving, thereby expanding its utility beyond simple conversational exchanges. This versatility not only enhances its performance in various tasks but also makes it an invaluable resource in fields that increasingly rely on sophisticated AI-driven solutions. Its adaptability and efficiency position it as a key player in the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence applications.

Qwen3.6 is a next-generation large language model developed by Alibaba, designed to deliver advanced reasoning, coding, and multimodal capabilities. It builds on the Qwen3.5 series with a strong emphasis on stability, efficiency, and real-world usability. The model supports multimodal inputs, enabling it to process text, images, and video for more complex analysis and decision-making. One of its key strengths is agentic AI, allowing it to perform multi-step tasks and operate more autonomously in workflows. Qwen3.6 is particularly optimized for coding, capable of handling complex engineering tasks at a repository level rather than just individual functions. It uses a mixture-of-experts architecture, with billions of parameters but only a subset activated during each inference, improving efficiency. The model is available in both open-weight and proprietary versions, giving developers flexibility in deployment and customization. It can be integrated into enterprise systems, APIs, and cloud environments for production use. Qwen3.6 also offers strong multimodal reasoning, enabling it to analyze documents, visuals, and structured data together. It is designed to support a wide range of applications, from software development to data analysis and automation. The model includes enhancements in performance, scalability, and usability compared to earlier versions. It reflects a broader shift toward agent-based AI systems that can execute tasks rather than just provide responses. Overall, Qwen3.6 represents a powerful and versatile AI model for modern enterprise and developer use cases.

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is a pioneering open-weight multimodal Mixture-of-Experts architecture that offers an initial look at the design meant for its successor, Qwen4. This model has been expertly crafted to enhance various aspects such as attention mechanisms, residual pathways, embeddings, and optimization strategies, thereby increasing its overall functionality, enhancing computational efficiency, expanding its model capacity, and ensuring stability during training. Its unique hybrid structure combines Gated DeltaNet, which effectively condenses historical information, with Qwen Sparse Attention, facilitating the selection of meaningful context on a micro-block scale to reduce both attention and indexing expenses for lengthy sequences. The Gated Residual feature enhances the residual pathway by incorporating four streams, which helps in dynamically regulating the information flow across different layers. Moreover, the N-gram Embedding cleverly merges large-scale local-pattern memory with minimal computational overhead for each token, with the capability to transfer to host memory for added efficiency. The entire model is built around a main network comprising 125 billion parameters, supplemented by an additional 51 billion parameters specifically for N-gram embeddings, activating only 6 billion parameters for each token processed. This advanced framework underscores the continuous evolution in machine learning architectures, laying the groundwork for exciting future innovations, and it exemplifies the increasing sophistication and potential of multimodal models in various applications.

Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B emerges as the largest open model in the Qwen3.8 series, presenting advanced Qwen-Max-class capabilities in a format that is accessible to the public. Built on the robust foundation of Qwen3.5, this model offers marked improvements in performance across various domains, including coding, professional applications, research, and complex, extended agentic tasks, underscoring its ability to reliably execute intricate, multi-step workflows to completion. With its innovative mixture-of-experts architecture, it features a remarkable total of 2.4 trillion parameters, of which 95 billion are activated, utilizing 512 experts and allowing for simultaneous engagement of 10 routed experts alongside one shared expert. The model supports a native context length of 262,144 tokens, extendable to about 1.01 million tokens, thereby enabling considerable adaptability for diverse applications. Additionally, enhancements in agent execution, such as superior autonomous planning and improved responsiveness to environmental cues, enhance its overall efficiency. Its extensive compatibility with popular agent frameworks and development tools further aids in smooth integration into current systems, making it an appealing option for both developers and researchers. This versatility is particularly beneficial for those seeking to leverage advanced AI capabilities in their projects.

Qwen 4 is Alibaba’s forthcoming next-generation foundation model and the planned successor to the company’s Qwen3.x model family. Alibaba announced Qwen 4 at the 2026 Apsara Conference on September 22 and confirmed that the model is currently in training. The company has not yet disclosed Qwen 4’s architecture, parameter count, context length, training-compute requirements, benchmark scores, pricing, licensing terms, or release schedule. Qwen 4 is being developed as Alibaba expands its broader AI stack across foundation models, multimodal systems, AI infrastructure, and agent-oriented cloud services. A major research direction surrounding Alibaba’s next generation of models is recursive self-improvement based on real-world tasks and empirical feedback. The company has already experimented with this approach using Qwen3.8-Max, allowing the model to participate in automated pipeline design, data validation, experimentation, error diagnosis, and post-training optimization. Alibaba reported that Qwen3.8-Max completed 33 iterative cycles during one such experiment and increased its Artificial Analysis score from 40 to 45. In a separate chip-design experiment, a Qwen model performed more than 10,000 EDA tool calls during over 60 hours of automated improvement work, illustrating Alibaba’s interest in long-horizon agentic tasks. These demonstrations describe the research program surrounding future Qwen development rather than confirmed features of Qwen 4 itself. Alibaba has also announced a longer-term roadmap in which Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 models are projected to reach between 5 trillion and 10 trillion parameters. Qwen 4 therefore remains a pre-release model, with detailed capabilities and access information expected to become clearer when Alibaba publishes its formal launch materials.