Alibaba is updating its artificial intelligence chatbot Qwen as it pushes to catch up with tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The revised app replaces the older Tongyi version and became available on both major app stores on Friday, last week.
In its app-store descriptions, Alibaba calls Qwen the “most powerful official AI assistant for its models” and the main way for users to try its newest Qwen model. The company also plans to add agent-style features that can help shoppers on platforms such as Taobao, according to Bloomberg. Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment.
Alibaba has spent the past two years trying to expand the use of its Qwen models during the global rush toward AI tools. Along with newer Chinese players like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, Alibaba has become one of the country’s bigger AI developers. It has also supported an open-source approach by making its models available for others to use and adapt.
Alibaba has been trying to turn these models into steady revenue, and the push appears to be paying off. In the June quarter, sales from its AI products grew at triple-digit rates for the eighth quarter in a row.
At the same time, Alibaba cut the cost of using Qwen3-Max, its largest model, by almost half, according to the South China Morning Post. The trillion-parameter system launched in September with some of the highest prices on Alibaba Cloud. The company has now reduced its lowest API rates from US$0.861 to US$0.459 per million input tokens and from US$3.441 to US$1.836 per million output tokens. Users who run batch tasks during off-peak hours get another 50 per cent discount.
The model recently placed first in a cryptocurrency investment contest that compared top models from both the US and China. Its price drop comes amid sharper competition in China’s model market. Several start-ups — including Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI, and MiniMax — have released new systems in recent months and have promoted their performance and low costs.
China has already seen several rounds of price cuts across the AI sector. There have been earlier battles between major model developers, followed by new competition in areas such as coding tools. This week, Volcano Engine, the cloud unit of ByteDance, introduced a new coding agent for 9.90 yuan (US$1.30) for the first month.
Companies have also tried new ways to attract customers. Last week on Tuesday, Moonshot AI — which Alibaba backs — rolled out an offer that lets new users try its Kimi K2 Thinking model for as little as 0.99 yuan. People were encouraged to negotiate their own discount with the Kimi chatbot, which led some users to share “prompt injection” tips online, including messages that tricked the system into thinking they worked for Moonshot. Within hours, the company said the chatbot had started “hallucinating,” and engineers were called to fix the issues.
Alibaba’s fast progress in AI has also been noticed in the United States. “Silicon Valley doesn’t want to admit it, but the symptoms are obvious: we’re witnessing a full-blown Qwen panic,” marketing specialist Tulsi Soni wrote on social media on Saturday.
At the same time, Alibaba had to defend itself against claims reported by the Financial Times. The report said a White House memo alleged Alibaba had provided China’s People’s Liberation Army with certain technical support, including access to some customer data such as IP addresses, Wi-Fi details, payment information, and AI services. The memo also claimed that Alibaba staff had passed along information about “zero-day” security flaws.
The FT said it could not confirm the memo on its own but said the claims pointed to rising concern in Washington about the risks tied to Chinese cloud and AI providers.
Alibaba rejected the allegations, saying they were “completely false” and questioning the motives behind the leak. A spokesperson described the report as a “malicious PR operation” meant to weaken a recent trade deal between the US and China.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the US criticised the FT’s reporting as well, calling the accusations “groundless” and a distortion of facts.
(Photo by zhang hui)
See also: Alibaba’s new Qwen model to supercharge AI transcription tools
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