Alibaba has introduced Qwen 3.5, asserting that its AI model surpasses those of its American competitors
Alibaba has introduced Qwen 3.5, asserting that it offers a more affordable and quicker AI solution with the ability to act independently, positioning itself against US competitors in performance evaluations.
On Monday, Alibaba introduced its newest artificial intelligence model, Qwen 3.5, which is engineered to perform intricate tasks autonomously while achieving significant enhancements in both performance and cost efficiency. The Chinese tech giant announced that the new model surpasses top US AI models across various benchmarks.
Alibaba is launching this release in an effort to broaden the user base of its Qwen chatbot app in China, a market that is presently led by ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, the first Chinese AI company to achieve a significant global breakthrough last year.
Alibaba reports that Qwen 3.5 operates at 60% lower costs and is eight times more efficient in handling large workloads compared to the previous version. The company emphasized the model’s “visual agentic capabilities,” enabling it to autonomously execute tasks across mobile and desktop applications.
“Engineered for the agentic AI era, Qwen 3.5 aims to assist developers and enterprises in accelerating their processes and maximizing output with the same computational resources, establishing a new standard for capability relative to inference cost,” Alibaba stated.
On Saturday, ByteDance launched Doubao 2.0, an enhanced version of its chatbot app, which now has nearly 200 million users. The company has positioned its latest model as specifically designed for the era of AI agents.
Industry analysts observe that the introduction of Qwen 3.5 may assist Alibaba in capitalizing on its recent successes within China’s highly competitive AI market. Earlier this month, the e-commerce giant’s coupon giveaway campaign within the Qwen chatbot resulted in a seven-fold increase in active users, even with some technical glitches encountered.
Last year, Alibaba was one of the initial competitors of DeepSeek to react to the startup’s rapid growth, launching Qwen 2.5-Max, which it asserted surpassed one of DeepSeek’s well-liked models.
In its most recent announcement, Alibaba made no mention of DeepSeek. The benchmarks provided compared Qwen 3.5 solely with earlier versions and competing US models, such as GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro.
DeepSeek is set to unveil its next-generation AI model in the near future, a development that has garnered significant attention from investors and industry insiders following the company’s role in last year’s global tech share selloff.
