Alibaba unveils new Qwen3.5 model for 'agentic AI era'

BEIJING: Alibaba on Monday unveiled a new artificial intelligence model Qwen 3.5, designed to execute complex tasks independently, with big improvements in performance and cost that the Chinese tech giant claims beat major U.S. rival models on several benchmarks.

The release comes as Alibaba looks to attract more users to its Qwen chatbot app in China, a landscape currently dominated by rival tech giant ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, which became the first Chinese AI firm to break through globally last year.

Alibaba said Qwen3.5 was 60% cheaper to use and eight times better at processing large workloads than its immediate predecessor, adding that the model also came with the ability to independently take actions across mobile and desktop apps, or what the company calls “visual agentic capabilities”.

“Built for the agentic AI era, Qwen3.5 is designed to help developers and enterprises move faster and do more with the same compute, setting a new benchmark for capability per unit of inference cost,” the company said in a statement.

ByteDance on Saturday released Doubao 2.0, an upgrade to its chatbot app that currently commands the largest user base in China, approaching 200 million. The announcement, like Alibaba’s, also positioned the new model as suited to the AI agent era.

The rollout of Qwen3.5 could help further recent gains Alibaba has made in the cutthroat competition of AI models in China. Earlier this month, the e-commerce giant’s coupon giveaway campaign that encouraged consumers to purchase food and drink directly in the Qwen chatbot led to a seven-fold increase in active users, despite some glitches.

Last year, the e-commerce giant was one of the first of DeepSeek’s competitors to respond to the startup’s viral rise, releasing Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claimed was superior to one of DeepSeek’s hit models.

The company did not mention DeepSeek in its announcement for Qwen3.5, and the several benchmarks it published only show the new model outperforming a previous iteration and rival U.S. models GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro.

DeepSeek is expected to release its new-generation model in the coming days, fueling anticipation among investors and industry insiders, given the global tech share selloff the company triggered a year ago.