Alibaba's Qwen3.5: A 397-Billion-Parameter Bet on AI Agents and Global Reach
Alibaba's AI team is racing to outpace rivals as Chinese New Year fireworks light up the sky—and the AI agent revolution.
The newly released Qwen3.5 series packs 397 billion parameters and now offers multilingual support for 201 languages, up from 82, while offering native multimodal capabilities for text, image and video.
Both open‑weight and hosted versions are available, letting developers integrate the model into their own AI agents such as OpenClaw without a licensing barrier.
Alibaba says the model achieves performance parity with leading OpenAI, Anthropic and Google offerings, based on self‑reported benchmark results.
Marc Einstein of Counterpoint Research warned:
"If this happens the consequences for those who are not prepared will be severe and Chinese AI companies are aware of this."
Einstein’s warning frames the rapid rollout as a potential disruption to business models that rely on slower, proprietary updates.
Alibaba, by contrast, emphasizes open‑weight releases and multilingual reach as a way to lock in developers early, betting that the claimed parity will translate into market share.
And the timing aligns with a wave of agent‑focused launches from rivals like ByteDance and Zhipu AI, underscoring how the AI arms race is heating up during the holiday season.
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Yunus Yagis
Yunus Yagis
