Alibaba Launches Qwen3.5 AI Model for Autonomous Agents

Alibaba Group launched its latest artificial intelligence model, Qwen3.5, on February 16, positioning the system as a key advancement for autonomous AI agents capable of handling complex tasks independently. The release, timed on the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday, introduces both an open-weight version for developers to customize and deploy on their own infrastructure and a hosted option through Alibaba Cloud, known as Qwen3.5 Plus.

The model represents a significant upgrade in efficiency and performance, according to Alibaba. It operates 60 percent cheaper than its predecessor while delivering eight times the throughput for large workloads. At its core is a mixture-of-experts architecture with 397 billion total parameters, though only 17 billion activate per prompt, enabling selective processing to lower hardware demands without compromising reasoning capabilities. Alibaba described the design as combining linear attention mechanisms via Gated Delta Networks with sparse expert routing, which enhances inference speed.

Qwen3.5 supports multimodal inputs, processing text, images, and videos natively in a unified framework. It can analyze videos up to two hours long and handles...