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Alibaba Launches Qwen 3.5, Claims AI Model Outperforms US Rivals
Alibaba on Monday unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model, Qwen 3.5, designed to execute complex tasks independently while delivering major improvements in performance and cost. The Chinese tech giant said the new model outperforms leading US AI models on several benchmarks.
The release comes as Alibaba seeks to expand the user base of its Qwen chatbot app in China, where the market is currently dominated by ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, the first Chinese AI firm to make a global breakthrough last year.
According to Alibaba, Qwen 3.5 is 60% cheaper to operate and eight times more efficient at processing large workloads than its predecessor. The company highlighted the model’s “visual agentic capabilities,” allowing it to independently perform actions across mobile and desktop applications.
“Built for the agentic AI era, Qwen 3.5 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,” Alibaba said in a statement.
ByteDance, meanwhile, released Doubao 2.0 on Saturday, an upgrade to its chatbot app that currently boasts nearly 200 million users. The company also positioned its latest model as tailored for the AI agent era.
Industry analysts note that the rollout of Qwen 3.5 could help Alibaba build on recent gains in China’s fiercely competitive AI market. Earlier this month, the e-commerce giant’s coupon giveaway campaign within the Qwen chatbot led to a seven-fold increase in active users, despite some technical glitches.
Last year, Alibaba was among the first of DeepSeek’s competitors to respond to the startup’s viral growth, releasing Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claimed outperformed one of DeepSeek’s popular models.
In its latest announcement, Alibaba did not reference DeepSeek. The benchmarks shared compared Qwen 3.5 only against prior iterations and rival US models, including GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro.
DeepSeek is expected to launch its next-generation AI model in the coming days, a development closely watched by investors and industry insiders after the company sparked a global tech share selloff last year.