Alibaba has unveiled its latest AI model called Qwen3.5, as newer launches from Chinese companies catch up to their US counterparts in the race for AI dominance. The first model in the open-weight Qwen3.5 series demonstrates “outstanding results across a range of benchmarks”, the company said. It ranks higher than OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro in several of the tests. The model is built on a hybrid architecture that allows only 17bn parameters to activate per forward pass, while comprising of a total of 397bn parameters. This, Alibaba said, optimises speed without sacrificing its capability.

Full report : Alibaba debuts Qwen 3.5, adding “visual agentic capabilities” to independently execute tasks, and says it is 60% cheaper to use and 8x better at large workloads.