Qwen3.5 Open Weight and Qwen3.5-Plus Reveal Major Leap in Open AI Capabilities

Alibaba Cloud has unveiled its latest advancements in open artificial intelligence with the release of the Qwen3.5 Open Weight and Qwen3.5-Plus models, marking a pivotal moment in the global open-weight AI landscape. According to Analytics Vidhya, these models represent the culmination of a rapid evolution in Alibaba’s Qwen series, following recent releases such as Qwen3-Coder-Next and Qwen Image 2.0. Unlike proprietary models locked behind APIs, Qwen3.5 Open Weight is fully accessible for local deployment, enabling researchers, developers, and enterprises to customize, audit, and optimize the model for specific use cases without vendor restrictions.

Independent hands-on testing, as detailed in the Analytics Vidhya report, evaluated both versions across a battery of benchmarks including MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, and multilingual tasks. The Qwen3.5-Plus model, a high-performance variant, achieved a score of 87.3 on MMLU—surpassing Llama 3.1 70B and nearing the performance of GPT-4o in general knowledge. Meanwhile, the open-weight variant, while slightly less powerful, still delivered 84.1 on the same benchmark, making it one of the most capable open models available for commercial and academic use.

Code generation capabilities, a key focus area for Alibaba, saw dramatic improvements. On the HumanEval benchmark, Qwen3.5-Plus scored 89.2%, outperforming Claude 3.5 Sonnet and approaching the performance of GPT-4 Turbo. The Qwen3.5 Open Weight model, optimized for efficiency, achieved 85.6%, demonstrating that even the lighter version retains strong coding aptitude. This is particularly significant for organizations seeking to integrate AI-powered development tools without relying on cloud-based APIs or incurring recurring costs.

Image generation, previously enhanced with Qwen Image 2.0, was not directly part of the Qwen3.5 release, but the models now feature improved multimodal understanding. When prompted with image-text hybrid queries, both versions exhibited superior contextual reasoning compared to their predecessors, accurately interpreting complex visual descriptions and generating coherent, relevant responses. This suggests a more unified architecture across Alibaba’s AI ecosystem, where vision and language models are increasingly interoperable.

One of the most compelling aspects of Qwen3.5 Open Weight is its licensing. Unlike many open models that impose restrictive usage terms, Alibaba has released it under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing unrestricted commercial use, modification, and redistribution. This move positions Qwen3.5 as a serious contender to Meta’s Llama series and Mistral’s open models, especially in markets where data sovereignty and regulatory compliance are paramount.

Security and transparency have also been prioritized. The model weights, training data summaries, and evaluation scripts are publicly available on Hugging Face and ModelScope, enabling third-party audits—a rare level of openness in the current AI climate. Experts in AI ethics have noted that this transparency could accelerate trust in open-source models, particularly in healthcare, finance, and public sector applications where explainability is non-negotiable.

While the Qwen3.5-Plus model remains proprietary and accessible via Alibaba’s cloud platform, the open-weight variant’s release signals a strategic pivot: Alibaba is not just competing with OpenAI and Anthropic—it’s building an open ecosystem that invites collaboration. As enterprises increasingly seek alternatives to proprietary AI, Qwen3.5 Open Weight may become the de facto standard for organizations prioritizing control, cost-efficiency, and customization.

With this release, Alibaba has not only upgraded its AI suite—it has redefined the expectations for open-weight models. The Qwen3.5 series is no longer merely a Chinese alternative to Western AI; it is a globally relevant, high-performance, and ethically transparent platform poised to shape the next generation of AI development.