Alibaba Debuts Most Powerful AI Model Yet, Qwen3-Max

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced its most powerful artificial intelligence model to date– Qwen3-Max with over 1 trillion parameters– at its annual conference on Wednesday, marking the company’s largest-ever leap in AI development.

Earlier this month, the Chinese e-commerce giant unveiled Qwen3-Max-Preview (Instruct), boasting more than 1 trillion parameters. 

Qwen3-Max is designed to excel in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities, allowing it to operate with fewer human prompts compared to traditional chatbots like ChatGPT.

This enables the system to make decisions and execute tasks independently, based on goals set by users, Alibaba Cloud CTO Zhou Jingren said.

According to Alibaba, Qwen3-Max outperformed competitors including Anthropic’s Claude and DeepSeek-V3.1 on third-party benchmarks such as Tau2-Bench, reinforcing its ambition to compete at the global AI frontier.

AI has become central to Alibaba’s growth strategy. Earlier this year, the company committed 380 billion yuan ($53.4 billion) over three years to build AI infrastructure, and CEO Eddie Wu indicated further investments ahead.

“The speed of AI industry development has far exceeded our expectations, and the industry’s demand for AI infrastructure has also far exceeded our expectations,” Wu said.

Alibaba also introduced Qwen3-Omni, a multimodal immersive system tailored for virtual and augmented reality applications, including smart glasses and intelligent cockpits.

The Qwen3 launch underscores Alibaba’s race to lead China’s intensifying AI competition.