Alibaba Unveils Qwen3.5 Amid Speculation Over Older Model Availability
Alibaba has launched the Qwen3.5 series, positioning it as a breakthrough for agentic AI, but questions persist about the availability of earlier versions—Qwen 3.5 2B, 9B, and 35B-A3B—after they vanished from public repositories. Developers are left searching for clarity as open-source communities react.
Alibaba Unveils Qwen3.5 Amid Speculation Over Older Model Availability
Alibaba Cloud has officially unveiled its latest large language model, Qwen3.5, marking a strategic pivot toward the emerging "agentic AI era"—a paradigm where AI systems autonomously plan, execute, and adapt tasks without constant human intervention. According to Reuters, the new model is engineered to deliver superior performance with reduced computational demands, enabling enterprises to scale AI applications more efficiently. The announcement, made on February 16, 2026, signals Alibaba’s intent to compete directly with OpenAI, Google, and Meta in the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape.
Yet, alongside this high-profile launch, a growing unease has emerged within the open-source AI community. On Reddit’s r/LocalLLaMA, users are urgently questioning the disappearance of earlier Qwen iterations: Qwen 3.5 2B, 9B, and 35B-A3B. These models, previously hosted on Hugging Face and GitHub, have been removed without official explanation. Developers who relied on these lighter-weight variants for edge computing, local deployment, and research are now left without access, raising concerns about transparency and long-term model stewardship.
Alibaba’s official Qwen Chat platform, accessible at chat.qwen.ai, currently offers access to Qwen3.5-Plus and other premium variants—but only through registered accounts and cloud-based APIs. The platform emphasizes ease of use, image generation, and mobile integration, yet conspicuously omits any mention of downloadable, open-source checkpoints for the smaller Qwen3.5 models. This selective availability has fueled speculation that Alibaba is shifting from an open-source-first strategy to a controlled, commercialized model distribution approach.
Meanwhile, academic research continues to reference earlier Qwen iterations. A peer-reviewed paper on OpenReview, published in September 2023 and updated in February 2024, details the capabilities of Qwen-VL, a vision-language model developed by a team including Jinze Bai and Shuai Bai from Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab. The paper, accepted for ICLR 2024, demonstrates robust performance in image captioning, text localization, and visual reasoning—capabilities now reportedly enhanced in Qwen3.5. However, the study does not reference the 2B, 9B, or 35B-A3B variants, suggesting these models may have been deprecated before formal academic validation.
Industry analysts note that Alibaba’s move mirrors broader trends among Chinese tech giants, where open-source releases are increasingly used as marketing tools rather than long-term commitments. While Qwen3.5’s efficiency gains are technically impressive—claiming up to 40% faster inference on comparable hardware—the lack of backward compatibility threatens trust among developers who invested time and resources into integrating earlier versions.
As of now, Alibaba has not issued a public statement addressing the removal of the older Qwen models. Community forums are abuzz with theories: some believe the models were pulled due to licensing conflicts or undisclosed security vulnerabilities; others suspect a strategic repositioning to drive enterprise adoption of Alibaba’s paid AI services. The silence has only deepened the skepticism.
For now, developers are turning to archived snapshots and community mirrors to preserve access to the discontinued models. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s focus remains firmly on Qwen3.5, as evidenced by its integration into Alibaba’s cloud ecosystem and promotional campaigns targeting enterprise clients. The future of open-source Qwen models hangs in the balance—caught between innovation and institutional control.
