Alibaba unveils Qwen-3.5, sharpening global race to spread AI models

Alibaba Cloud has unveiled its next-generation open artificial intelligence model, Qwen-3.5, in a move set to have major implications for the global AI race between China and the US.The much-anticipated release, timed on the eve of the Lunar New Year, capped a frenetic week in which nearly every major Chinese AI developer rolled out new flagship models.The two new 3.5-series models were made available on Alibaba’s cloud platform Model Studio on Monday afternoon.The new Qwen-3.5-Open-Source model with 397 billion parameters showed significant improvement over the company’s previous flagship model, Qwen-3-Max-Thinking, despite the latter’s much larger size of over 1 trillion parameters, according to self-reported benchmark scores.The model also boasted a performance on par with leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, the benchmarks showed, although the comparison was not with the three US heavyweights’ latest models.Meanwhile, a closed-source version called Qwen-3.5-Plus achieved performance “on par with state-of-the-art leading models” and has a listed context window – the amount of data it can process at any given time – of 1 million tokens, one of the largest in the industry.