AIster · The agentic age · Launches
Alibaba releases Qwen3.5 as open weights
China's most widely adopted open model family went multimodal and was built for agents
Key facts
- Date
- 16 Feb 2026
- Era
- The agentic age
- Interest
- Launches
- Threads
- Model wars, Open vs closed
- Flagship
- Qwen3.5-397B-A17B: 397B total, 17B active parameters
- Context
- 262,144 tokens native
- Licence
- Apache 2.0
- Adoption
- 151,448 Qwen-derived models on Hugging Face by Aug 2026
Alibaba open-sourced Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, the first open-weight model (one whose files anyone can download) in its Qwen3.5 series, under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. It is a sparse mixture-of-experts model, which uses only 17 billion of its 397 billion parameters (the numbers a model learns in training) for each token, and it is multimodal, handling text, images and video, in 201 languages and dialects. More Qwen3.5 models followed in the weeks after.
Sources
- Alibaba Group, Alibaba Open-Sources Qwen3.5, A Natively Multimodal Model Built For High-Efficiency Inference, 2026-02-16
- Hugging Face, Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, 2026-02-16
- Hugging Face, State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations, 2026-08-14