Alibaba unveils Qwen3.5 as China’s chatbot race shifts to AI agents

Alibaba has released Qwen3.5, a new AI model series that comes in both an open-weight version (downloadable and runnable on users' own computers) and a hosted version (running on Alibaba's servers), featuring improved performance, multimodal capabilities (ability to understand text, images, and video together), and support for AI agents (systems that can independently complete multi-step tasks with minimal human supervision). The release reflects intensifying competition in China's AI market, as multiple Chinese companies are racing to develop agent capabilities similar to those recently released by American AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.