(April 2): Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has released its third proprietary AI model in as many days, reinforcing the company’s intent to focus on profiting off its flagship artificial intelligence services.
China’s e-commerce leader unfurled the agentic AI-focused Qwen3.6-Plus on Thursday, days after it trotted out upgrades to an image-generation platform and a multimodal model that can understand inputs like voice and images as well as text. All three are closed-source, meaning developers cannot download and access its code, or adapt the technology for their own purposes.
That runs counter to the typical practice of many Chinese developers including MiniMax Group Inc and DeepSeek, which prefer to open up their models to promote usage and adoption.
Alibaba’s Qwen platforms are among the world’s most popular in part because of their open nature. But the internet pioneer is now driving a major restructuring aimed at generating income off its sprawling AI effort. While Alibaba has emphasised it will continue to release open-source models, going proprietary in select instances allows Alibaba to retain greater control and charge more users directly.
Alibaba’s keen to monetise its growing AI portfolio in part to counter weakness in its e-commerce business, which is grappling with fierce domestic competition.
The company is moving to shore up its bottom-line in other ways. Alibaba in March launched an agentic AI service known as Wukong for company clients, and hiked prices for its cloud and storage services by as much as 34%. The latest model, Qwen3.6-Plus, will be integrated with Wukong, the flagship Qwen app and other agentic AI services.
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