Alibaba unveils Qwen3.5 as China’s chatbot race shifts to AI agents

Alibaba Group has unveiled its latest AI model, Qwen3.5, which boasts enhanced features amid fierce competition in China's burgeoning AI sector. This new model is available in an open-weight format, allowing users to download, run, fine-tune, and deploy it on their own systems. Additionally, Alibaba has introduced a hosted version that operates on its own servers, making it more accessible for users. Released just before the Chinese New Year, the Qwen3.5 model follows closely on the heels of another recent AI offering from Alibaba tailored specifically for robotic applications. The company emphasized that Qwen3.5 provides improved performance and cost-efficiency, equipped with advanced multimodal capabilities that allow it to process text, images, and video concurrently within a single framework. In line with the current trend towards AI agents, the Qwen3.5 model also features new coding and agentic abilities, making it compatible with popular open-source AI agents like those from OpenClaw, which have gained significant traction recently. These AI agents can perform tasks autonomously, managing complex, multi-step operations with minimal user oversight. The rise of such agents has captured considerable attention, especially following the release of new tools by American AI firm Anthropic. Alibaba's local rivals, including ByteDance and Zhipu AI, have also rolled out upgraded models focused on enhancing agent capabilities in recent days. The Qwen3.5 open-weight model is reported to have 397 billion parameters—crucial variables that influence an AI's learning and reasoning processes. While this number is lower than that of its predecessor, Alibaba asserts that the new model demonstrates significant advancements based on its own benchmark evaluations. According to Alibaba, Qwen3.5's performance is competitive with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, although these comparisons were self-reported. Moreover, the newly released model supports 201 languages and dialects, a substantial increase from the previous generation's 82. Lin Junyang, the technical lead of Alibaba Cloud's Qwen team, hinted at the potential launch of additional open-weight models during the ongoing Chinese New Year celebrations. As the AI landscape evolves, major players in the industry are swiftly enhancing their agentic functionalities. OpenAI’s CEO recently announced that the creator of OpenClaw would be joining their team, while Google DeepMind's head indicated that Chinese AI models are rapidly closing the gap with their Western counterparts, stating that they are just "months" away from parity.