Alibaba Launches Qwen 3.5, Shocks AI World With Model 60% Cheaper Than OpenAI, Anthropic And Google Gemini – Here’s How It Could Change The Global AI Race

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has launched a new artificial intelligence model Qwen 3.5 developed to execute complex tasks independently with major improvements in performance and cost that the Chinese tech giant claims beat major US based rival models on several parameters. 

The launch arrives as Alibaba to attract more users to its Qwen chatbot app in China, a sector presently dominated by rival tech giant ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, which turns first Chinese AI company to break through globally last year. 

The Chinese tech giant Alibaba has claimed that Qwen3.5 was 60 per cent cheaper to use and eight times better at processing large workloads than its immediate predecessor after which the model also get ability to taken action independently across mobile and desktop apps, or what the company has named “visual agentic capabilities”.  

The company stated that “Built for the agentic AI era, Qwen3.5 is designed to help developers and ‌enterprises move faster and do more with the same compute, setting a new benchmark for capability per unit of inference cost” 

ByteDance on Sunday launched Doubao 2.0 which is an upgrade to its chatbot app that currently commands the largest user base in China. 

The launch of Qwen3.5 will help further recent gains Alibaba has made in the cutthroat competition of AI models in China. Earlier this month, the Chinese e-commerce giant launched the coupon giveaway campaign that encouraged consumers to purchase food and drink directly in the Qwen chatbot led to a seven-fold increase in active users. However, there were some glitches too. 

Previous year, the Alibaba was one of the first competitors of DeepSeek’s to respond to the startup’s viral rise, launching Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claimed was superior to one of DeepSeek’s hit models. 

The company has not mentioned DeepSeek in its announcement for Qwen3.5, and the several benchmarks it published only show the new model outperforming a previous iteration and rival US models such as GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro. 

DeepSeek is also likely to roll out its new-generation model in the coming days, fueling anticipated among investors and industry insiders given the global tech share selloff the company triggered a year ago.

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