Alibaba Launches Qwen3.5 as China Shifts from Chatbots to AI Agents

Alibaba has released its Qwen3.5 AI model series, adding agent-style features as China’s AI competition accelerates. The launch includes an open-weight model that users can download, fine-tune, and run on their own infrastructure, plus a hosted API version on Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba says Qwen3.5 improves performance and cost versus prior versions and adds native multimodal support for handling text, images, and video in one system. The model also supports coding workflows and works with open-source agent tools such as OpenClaw, reflecting the industry shift toward systems that carry out multi-step tasks with minimal supervision. Alibaba reports 397 billion parameters and support for 201 languages and dialects, up from 82.