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Alibaba Launches Qwen3.5, an ‘Agentic’ AI Model With Open-Weight and Hosted Options

Alibaba frames the release as a lower-cost, agentic upgrade with unverified performance claims.

Overview

  • Alibaba says Qwen3.5 cuts inference costs by 60% and handles large workloads eight times more efficiently than its prior model.
  • New “visual agentic” features let the system take actions inside mobile and desktop apps to complete multistep tasks.
  • Qwen3.5 supports 201 languages and dialects and arrives as both downloadable open weights and a cloud-hosted Qwen3.5-Plus.
  • Company-published benchmarks claim an edge over GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro, with no independent verification cited.
  • The release escalates China’s AI race as ByteDance rolls out Doubao 2.0 and DeepSeek readies a new model, following a Qwen coupon push that briefly lifted active users seven-fold.