Alibaba launches open-source AI coding model

Alibaba Group has launched Qwen3-Coder, an open-source artificial intelligence model for software development. The Chinese e-commerce giant has described it as its most advanced coding tool to date.

“We’re releasing Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, our most powerful open agentic code model to date,” said a post on Qwen's X account.

The launch comes amid intensifying competition among Chinese technology companies in the global AI development race, with firms on both sides of the Pacific releasing increasingly sophisticated models.

The company said in a statement that Qwen3-Coder is designed for software development tasks such as code generation and managing complex coding workflows. Alibaba has positioned the model as particularly strong in "agentic AI coding tasks" - automated processes where AI systems can work independently on programming challenges.

According to performance data released by Alibaba, Qwen3-Coder outperformed domestic competitors, including models from DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's K2 in key coding capabilities. The company also claimed its model matched the performance of leading U.S. models, including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4 in certain areas.

This AI model natively supports 256,000 context and scales to 1 million context with extrapolation, it said, while available in multiple sizes.

“It achieves top-tier performance across multiple agentic coding benchmarks among open models, including SWE-bench-Verified,” the post on X read.

“Alongside the model, we're also open-sourcing a command-line tool for agentic coding: Qwen Code. Forked from Gemini Code, it includes custom prompts and function call protocols to fully unlock Qwen3-Coder’s capabilities. Qwen3-Coder works seamlessly with the community’s best developer tools. As a foundation model, we hope it can be used anywhere across the digital world — Agentic Coding in the World,” it added.