Qwen3 is Alibaba's latest large language model, which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with "advanced, dynamic reasoning."
Alibaba Group has released its newest AI model series, featuring enhanced capabilities, as it faces intensifying competition in China's AI space with several models launched in the past week.
The Qwen3.5 AI model comes in an open-weight version, which allows users to download, run, fine-tune, and deploy it on their own infrastructure. Alibaba also released a "hosted version," meaning the model can run on Alibaba's own servers.
Both models were made available on Monday, the eve of the Chinese New Year, and come just a week after Alibaba released a new AI model designed for robots.
The company highlighted that Qwen3.5 offers improvements in performance and cost and was built with "native multimodal capabilities," enabling the models to understand text, images and video simultaneously within one system.
Leaning into a major AI trend this year, the model also supports new coding and agentic capabilities and is compatible with open-source AI agents like those from OpenClaw, which recently surged in popularity.
AI agents are systems that can independently take actions and complete multi-step tasks on a user's behalf with minimal supervision.
These agents and their abilities have garnered a lot of attention in recent weeks, after American AI company Anthropic released new agent tools. The potential for these agents to replace the work of software as a service companies, amongst others, has rocked markets.
Alibaba's local competitors such as ByteDance and Zhipu AI also released upgraded models in the past week aimed at supporting more agent capabilities.
The company said that its new Qwen3.5 open-weight model comes with 397 billion parameters — variables that shape how an AI system learns and reasons. While less than its previous flagship model, the company said the latest model showed significant improvement based on self-reported benchmark evaluations.
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