Alibaba launches Qwen3.6-Plus, its third proprietary AI model in days

Apr 2, 2026

Alibaba has released Qwen3.6-Plus, its third proprietary AI model in just a few days. The model is available through the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API and offers a context window of one million tokens. According to the Qwen team, the focus is on significantly improved capabilities for agentic coding, including frontend development and complex code tasks.

In benchmarks published by Alibaba, the model partially outperforms Anthropic's older flagship model Claude 4.5 Opus, which was replaced by the stronger 4.6 Opus in December 2025. It's worth noting that some of these measurements were conducted by Alibaba itself.

Das neue Qwen3.6-Plus übertrifft das ältere 3.5-Modell und in einigen Fällen auch Opus. Allerdings erreicht das im Dezember 2025 veröffentlichte Opus 4.6 etwa im Terminal-Bench 2.0 65,4 Prozent und liegt damit vor Qwen3.6-Plus. | Bild: Alibaba — Qwen3.6-Plus outperforms the older 3.5 model and in some cases beats Opus. However, the Opus 4.6 released in December 2025 scores 65.4 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.0, putting it ahead of Qwen3.6-Plus. | Image: Alibaba

For a long time, Alibaba released its Qwen models as open source, but the company has recently changed course. The latest Qwen3.5-Omni is also not freely available. Alibaba wants to drive more revenue from enterprise customers with its proprietary models, as its cloud division faces intense competition from ByteDance.

According to Bloomberg, Alibaba is targeting $100 billion in AI revenue over the next five years. Qwen3.6-Plus will be integrated into the Qwen chatbot app and the company's new enterprise AI service Wukong.

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Source: Qwen