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

South China Morning PostCenter-RightEN 1 min read 100% complete by Vincent ChowFebruary 16, 2026 at 10:19 AM

AI Summary

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Alibaba Cloud released its next-generation open AI model, Qwen-3.5, intensifying the global AI competition. The release, coinciding with the Lunar New Year, follows a week of new model announcements from major Chinese AI developers. Qwen-3.5 includes an open-source model with 397 billion parameters and a closed-source version, Qwen-3.5-Plus. Benchmark scores indicate the open-source model performs comparably to leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, despite having fewer parameters than Alibaba's previous model. The closed-source version reportedly matches the performance of state-of-the-art models and features a large context window of 1 million tokens. The release aims to strengthen Alibaba's position in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Key Entities & Roles

Key Player Opposition Context

Qwen-3-Max-Thinking 40% OpenAI 60% Anthropic 60% Google DeepMind 60% China 70% United States 70% Qwen-3.5 ×480% Alibaba Cloud ×290%

Keywords

ai model 100% qwen-3.5 90% artificial intelligence 80% benchmark scores 70% cloud platform 60% global ai race 50% open source 50% large language model 40%

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Positive

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South China Morning Post

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Center-Right (0.50)

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