Qwen3.8 Max Prime is a higher-throughput variant of Qwen3.8 Max, Alibaba's flagship reasoning and agentic model, served as a separate SKU with its own model id and its own price. The capabilities match the flagship — a 1,000,000-token context window, text, image and video input, tool calling and structured outputs — and reasoning is always on rather than switchable.
Reasoning tokens are billed at the output rate.
Throughput, not capability
Prime is the same model family served for higher throughput. If a workload is bounded by how fast tokens come back rather than by what the model can do, this is the SKU for it; otherwise the standard Qwen3.8 Max covers the same ground at roughly half the input price.
Video in the same request
Video joins text and images as an input modality, so clips can be analysed alongside the surrounding prompt without a separate pipeline.
Reasoning always on
There is no thinking toggle — every request reasons, and those tokens bill at the output rate.
Latency-sensitive agent loops
Multi-step pipelines where the wall-clock cost of each step decides whether the workflow is usable.
Multimodal analysis at volume
Batches of images or video that need a frontier-tier model rather than a small one.
Repository- and document-scale context
A 1M-token window holds whole codebases or document sets in one request.
Both share the 1,000,000-token context window and the 131,072-token output limit. Qwen3.8 Max costs $2.6 / 1M input and $7.8 / 1M output and offers a switchable thinking mode; Prime costs $5.5016 / $16.5048, adds video input and always reasons. Pick Prime when throughput is the constraint, the standard SKU when cost is.
import requests r = requests.post( "https://api.aimlapi.com/v1/chat/completions", headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + AIMLAPI_KEY}, json={ "model": "alibaba/qwen3.8-max-prime", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": "Hello!" } ] }, ) print(r.json())
const r = await fetch("https://api.aimlapi.com/v1/chat/completions", { method: "POST", headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.AIMLAPI_KEY}`, "Content-Type": "application/json", }, body: JSON.stringify({ "model": "alibaba/qwen3.8-max-prime", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": "Hello!" } ] }), }); console.log(await r.json());
curl -X POST https://api.aimlapi.com/v1/chat/completions \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $AIMLAPI_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"model":"alibaba/qwen3.8-max-prime","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'
OpenAI-compatible — swap the base URL and it works with your existing SDK.
| Type | Price |
|---|---|
| Input | |
| Output | |
| Cached input |
Prime is the higher-throughput SKU and is priced above the standard Qwen3.8 Max ($2.6 / $7.8 per 1M tokens).
Throughput-bound agent loops. Pipelines where wall-clock time per step decides whether the workflow is usable. Prime is the same model family served for higher throughput, which is the only reason to pay its premium over the standard SKU.
Video and image analysis at volume. Video joins text and images as an input modality, so clips are analysed in the same request as the prompt rather than through a separate pipeline.
Repository-scale code work. A 1,000,000-token window holds a large codebase with its tests, and 131,072 tokens of output is room for a substantial refactor in one reply.
Long-document research. Contracts, filings and archives handed over whole, with always-on reasoning applied to every request.
Create an account
Sign up at aimlapi.com — one key covers Prime, the standard Qwen3.8 Max and the rest of the catalogue.
Generate an API key
Create it in your dashboard and confirm it is active.
Point your client at the base URL
Use https://api.aimlapi.com/v1. The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, so an existing client needs only the base URL and key changed.
Make the call
Send chat messages to /chat/completions with alibaba/qwen3.8-max-prime as the model id.
Then check whether you need Prime at all
Run the same workload against alibaba/qwen3.8-max at $2.6 / $7.8. If throughput is not your constraint, the standard SKU does the same work for roughly half the input price.
| Model | Input | Output | Context | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Qwen3.8 Max Prime This page | Throughput-bound multimodal reasoning | |||
| Complex reasoning, coding and agentic workflows | ||||
| Frontier reasoning + agents | ||||
| Reasoning + agents | ||||
| Long-context, multimodal & agentic workflows |
Qwen3.8 Max Prime is a higher-throughput variant of Alibaba's flagship Qwen3.8 Max, served as its own SKU. It keeps the 1,000,000-token context window, accepts text, image and video input, and always reasons.
Prime is served for higher throughput and adds video as an input modality, and its reasoning is always on rather than switchable. Both share the same 1M-token context and 131,072-token output limit. Prime costs more: $5.5016 / $16.5048 per 1M tokens against $2.6 / $7.8 for the standard SKU.
On AI/ML API it costs $5.5016 per 1M input tokens and $16.5048 per 1M output tokens, with cached input at $0.6877 per 1M. Reasoning tokens are billed at the output rate.
Text, images and video in, text out, with up to 1,000,000 tokens in a single request and up to 131,072 tokens of output.
Send a POST request to https://api.aimlapi.com/v1/chat/completions with alibaba/qwen3.8-max-prime as the model id and your AI/ML API key in the Authorization header. The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, so an existing chat client only needs the base URL swapped.
