Alibaba Launches Qwen 3.5, Its Most Powerful AI Model Yet, Built for the Age of Autonomous Agents

Alibaba Enters the Agentic AI Race with Qwen 3.5

Alibaba Group has unveiled Qwen 3.5, its latest flagship artificial intelligence model, positioning the release as purpose-built for an emerging era of autonomous AI agents. The model launched on the sixteenth of February twenty twenty-six, capping a frenetic week in which nearly every major Chinese AI developer rolled out new flagship models ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.

Performance and Cost Breakthroughs

Qwen 3.5 arrives in two sizes, nine billion and thirty-five billion parameters, with native multimodal support for the first time. According to Alibaba, the model is sixty percent cheaper to operate and eight times better at processing large workloads than its predecessor. The company claims Qwen 3.5 outperforms US rivals including OpenAI's GPT-5.2, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5, and Google's Gemini 3 Pro across several published performance benchmarks, though independent evaluations suggest results vary depending on the specific benchmark used.

Visual Agentic Capabilities

The headline feature is what Alibaba calls visual agentic capabilities. This allows the model to take autonomous actions across both mobile and desktop applications without user intervention, processing text, images, and video, including footage up to two hours in length. The technology represents a shift from chatbots that merely answer questions to AI systems that can independently execute complex, multi-step tasks.

Global Reach and Language Support

Qwen 3.5 supports over two hundred languages and dialects, including many spoken in South Asia, Oceania, and Africa, enabling broader worldwide deployment with regional and cultural understanding built in.

Intensifying Competition in China

The release comes amid fierce competition in China's AI market, where Alibaba trails ByteDance's Doubao chatbot, which leads with one hundred and fifty-five million weekly active users. ByteDance launched Doubao 2.0 just days earlier, also framing its upgrade as suited for the agent era. Alibaba has gained ground through aggressive marketing, including a three-billion-yuan coupon campaign that drove a seven-fold increase in active users for its Qwen chatbot. A new model from DeepSeek is also anticipated, adding further intensity to the race.