The release marks Alibaba’s latest push to strengthen its position in China’s fiercely competitive AI landscape, where rivals including ByteDance and fast-rising startup DeepSeek have intensified pressure over the past year.
According to Alibaba, Qwen 3.5 is 60% cheaper to operate than its immediate predecessor and up to eight times more capable at handling large workloads. The company also highlighted what it calls “visual agentic capabilities,” enabling the model to independently take actions across mobile and desktop applications — a feature aimed at supporting the emerging era of AI agents that can perform complex, multi-step tasks with minimal human input.
“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,” the company said in a statement.
Rivalry in the Agentic AI Era
Alibaba’s announcement came just days after ByteDance rolled out Doubao 2.0, an upgraded version of its chatbot app, Doubao, which commands the largest user base in China at nearly 200 million users. Like Alibaba, ByteDance framed its new release as tailored for the “AI agent” era, underscoring how leading Chinese firms are converging on similar technological ambitions.
The battle for users has been especially intense. Earlier this month, Alibaba launched a coupon giveaway campaign that encouraged consumers to purchase food and beverages directly through its Qwen chatbot. Despite some technical glitches, the promotion reportedly drove a seven-fold increase in active users.
Benchmark Claims and Global Context
In detailing Qwen 3.5’s performance, Alibaba said the model outperformed its predecessor and several leading U.S. systems across internal benchmarks, including GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro. The company did not reference DeepSeek in its latest announcement.
Last year, Alibaba was among the first domestic competitors to respond to DeepSeek’s viral global breakthrough, introducing Qwen 2.5-Max and asserting superiority over one of the startup’s headline models.
DeepSeek is now expected to release its next-generation system in the coming days, a move closely watched by investors and industry insiders. The startup’s earlier advances were widely credited with triggering volatility in global technology shares, reflecting the growing geopolitical and commercial stakes in AI development.
As China’s leading tech companies race to refine more capable and cost-efficient AI systems, the launch of Qwen 3.5 signals that competition in the world’s second-largest economy is entering a new and increasingly strategic phase.