Alibaba Unveils Third Closed-Source AI Model in Focus on Profit

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.