Alibaba Releases Qwen3.5: Open-Weight MoE Model Claims to Beat US Rivals

Overview

Alibaba Cloud released Qwen3.5 on February 16-17, 2026, timed to coincide with the Chinese New Year. The model is engineered specifically for autonomous AI agents and is available as both an open-weight version (free to download, fine-tune, and deploy) and a hosted cloud version.

Technical Specifications

Parameters: 397 billion total (Mixture-of-Experts architecture, 17B active)

Multimodal: Native text, image, and video understanding in a single system

Languages: 201 languages and dialects (up from 82 in the previous generation)

Efficiency: 60% lower cost and 8x faster processing vs. predecessor

Benchmark Claims

Alibaba claims Qwen3.5 outperforms OpenAI's GPT-5.2, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5, and Google's Gemini 3 in its benchmarks, setting a "new benchmark for capability per unit of inference cost." Third-party verification of these claims is pending.

Agentic Capabilities

Qwen3.5 features "visual agentic capabilities" enabling it to perform independent actions across mobile and desktop applications without user intervention—a key differentiator as the AI market shifts toward agent-first architectures.

Context

The release comes amid intensifying competition in China's AI sector, with multiple models launched in the weeks following DeepSeek's disruptive market entry. Alibaba's open-weight strategy continues to challenge the assumption that frontier performance requires proprietary access.

Source: CNBC | Dataconomy