Alibaba Launches Qwen3-Coder, An Open-Source AI Coding Model

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Alibaba Launches Qwen3-Coder, An Open-Source AI Coding Model

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Alibaba Group launched its latest open-source AI model, Qwen3-Coder, on Wednesday. The advanced system has been designed for software development and has been promoted as the “most powerful open agentic code model to date.”

In a rush? Here are the quick facts:

  • Alibaba Group introduced its latest open-source AI model: Qwen3-Coder.
  • The AI model has been designed for software development and promoted as its “most powerful open agentic code model to date.”
  • The Chinese giant said the model’s features and agentic capabilities outperform similar models from competitors such as DeepSeek, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

According to the official announcement, Qwen3-Coder features agentic capabilities and comes in various parameter sizes to suit different needs. The model is also compatible with other advanced AI systems, such as Anthropic’s chatbot Claude.

“Today, we’re announcing Qwen3-Coder, our most agentic code model to date,” states the document. “Qwen3-Coder is available in multiple sizes, but we’re excited to introduce its most powerful variant first: Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct — a 480B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 35B active parameters which supports the context length of 256K tokens natively and 1M tokens with extrapolation methods, offering exceptional performance in both coding and agentic tasks.”

Alibaba emphasized that this open-source model is “comparable to Claude Sonnet 4,” one of Anthropic’s latest AI models launched in May.

The Chinese giant has also announced Qwen Code, a new command-line tool for agentic coding forked from Gemini Code.  The new tool includes function-calling protocols and customized prompts to “unleash” Qwen3-Coder’s agentic capabilities.

Qwen3-Coder reportedly outperforms similar models developed by competitors such as DeepSeek-R1-0528, Devstral-small-2507, Gemini 2.5-Pro-preview-0506, and GPT-4.1.

In a series of posts on the social media platform X, Alibaba demonstrated the AI model’s ability to create digital products such as a “Flappy Bird” game, a 3D Earth Terrain visualization, or animated weather cards.

“Impressive, Qwen never disappoints me,” said one user in the comments. “Now people don’t have to pay $200/month for Claude Code anymore. Time to short Anthropic.”

The AI model with coding capabilities has been released at a moment when competitors are building similar products for higher prices. Qwen3-Coder’s open-source nature and compatibility position it as a strong and affordable contender in the AI coding space.

Earlier this year, Alibaba released its advanced reasoning model Qwen 2.5-Max, shortly after DeekSeek’s reasoning model reached first place on Apple’s App Store in the U.S.

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