Beijing, February 16, 2026 – Alibaba has launched its new artificial intelligence model, Qwen 3.5, designed to perform complex tasks independently while reducing costs. The Chinese tech giant claims the model surpasses major U.S. AI competitors in several benchmarks.
The release is part of Alibaba’s efforts to expand users for its Qwen chatbot app in China. The app competes with ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, which have dominated the local AI landscape in recent years.
According to Alibaba, Qwen 3.5 is 60% cheaper to use than its predecessor and eight times more efficient at processing large workloads. The model also features “visual agentic capabilities,” allowing it to independently take actions across mobile and desktop applications.
“Built for the agentic AI era, Qwen 3.5 is designed to help developers and enterprises do more with the same compute, setting a new benchmark for capability per unit of inference cost,” Alibaba stated.
ByteDance recently launched Doubao 2.0, targeting the growing market of AI chatbot users in China, with nearly 200 million active accounts. Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 release is expected to strengthen the company’s position in the competitive AI sector.
Earlier this month, Alibaba’s Qwen chatbot saw a seven-fold increase in active users after a coupon campaign encouraged purchases through the app, despite minor technical issues.
Last year, Alibaba responded to DeepSeek’s viral AI models with Qwen 2.5-Max, claiming superior performance over the startup’s popular models. The new Qwen 3.5 announcement focused on comparisons with previous versions and U.S. AI models, including GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro, without mentioning DeepSeek.
Industry analysts say Qwen 3.5 could further Alibaba’s gains in China’s AI market, especially with DeepSeek expected to release its next-generation model soon. Investors and tech insiders are closely watching the competition, which continues to shape the future of AI applications globally.
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With Qwen 3.5, Alibaba aims to offer faster, cost-effective, and more capable AI tools for enterprises, developers, and consumers in China and beyond.
