February 18, 2026 Alibaba on Feb. 16 unveiled an artificial intelligence model, Qwen 3.5, designed to carry out complex tasks independently, with performance and cost gains the company says rival top U.S. models. The launch comes as Alibaba tries to expand its Qwen chatbot app in China, where competition is intensifying against ByteDance’s Doubao and rising domestic rival DeepSeek.
The new model marks Alibaba’s latest push into the fast-moving race toward so-called agentic AI systems. Qwen 3.5 introduces what the company describes as “visual agentic” capabilities, allowing the model to take actions across both mobile and desktop environments rather than simply generating text responses.
Alibaba said the model delivers a major efficiency jump over its predecessor, claiming roughly 60 per cent lower usage costs and significantly higher throughput for large workloads. Those improvements are aimed at developers and enterprise users.
“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,” the company said of the model in a statement.
The rollout lands amid an increasingly crowded Chinese AI market. ByteDance recently released Doubao 2.0, an upgraded version of its chatbot platform that already commands one of the largest user bases in the country, reportedly nearing 200 million users. Like Alibaba, ByteDance is framing its update around the emerging shift toward autonomous AI agents.
Alibaba has been trying to regain momentum in the segment after losing early ground to newcomers. DeepSeek’s rapid rise last year forced established players to accelerate releases, prompting Alibaba to ship earlier Qwen iterations more quickly. The company has since leaned on aggressive promotion, including in-app commerce experiments that temporarily boosted chatbot engagement.
While Alibaba’s latest benchmarks highlight gains against earlier versions and several U.S. frontier models, the broader competitive picture remains fluid. DeepSeek is widely expected to unveil its next-generation system soon, a release closely watched after the startup’s previous debut triggered global market reactions and reshaped expectations around Chinese AI capabilities.
