Alibaba releases open-source AI model for software development 

Alibaba Group has introduced Qwen3-Coder, an open-source AI model designed for software development tasks. The announcement comes amid growing competition among technology companies developing AI coding tools.

According to an official statement by Alibaba, the new model is positioned to handle code generation and manage programming workflows, with capabilities for what Alibaba describes as "agentic coding" tasks - where AI systems can work independently on coding problems. As per the company, Qwen3-Coder shows improved performance compared to some Chinese-developed models while achieving results similar to certain US models in some benchmarks.  

The primary version, Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, operates with 480 billion total parameters and uses 35 billion active parameters at a time. Alibaby says it can process up to 256,000 tokens of context, with potential expansion to 1 million tokens. The model includes features for interacting with code repositories and handling function calls in programming environments.  

The release follows recent AI model launches by other major tech companies, reflecting ongoing development in AI-assisted programming tools.