Alibaba debuts Qwen3-Coder, its most advanced Open-Source AI for developers
Unveiled on Wednesday, Qwen3-Coder is part of the Qwen family of foundation models developed by the Chinese tech giant.
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In a significant step forward in the global AI arms race, Alibaba has launched Qwen3-Coder, calling it the company’s most powerful open-source AI model designed specifically for software development and agentic coding.
Unveiled on Wednesday, Qwen3-Coder is part of the Qwen family of foundation models developed by the Chinese tech giant. This latest release is not just another large language model—it’s purpose-built for complex programming workflows and next-generation AI coding tasks.
“We’re releasing Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, our most powerful open agentic code model to date,” said the Qwen team in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
What Makes Qwen3-Coder Unique The Qwen3-Coder model is built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with a staggering 480 billion parameters, of which 35 billion are active at any time. The model natively supports a context window of 256,000 tokens and is capable of scaling up to 1 million tokens using extrapolation techniques. This enables it to handle extremely large and intricate codebases—an essential feature for enterprise and developer use.
In benchmark tests, Qwen3-Coder has demonstrated top-tier performance across multiple agentic coding evaluations, including SWE-bench-Verified, a leading benchmark for software engineering tasks.
Tooling and Ecosystem Support To complement the model, Alibaba is also open-sourcing Qwen Code, a command-line tool forked from Gemini Code. This tool includes tailored prompts and function call protocols to help developers fully harness the capabilities of Qwen3-Coder.
“Qwen3-Coder works seamlessly with the community’s best developer tools,” said the company. “As a foundation model, we hope it can be used anywhere across the digital world — Agentic Coding in the World.”
This reflects Alibaba’s broader mission to position Qwen as a plug-and-play tool for AI-powered coding, offering flexibility and interoperability across platforms.
Looking Ahead: Self-Improving Agents? Alibaba emphasized that the Qwen team is actively developing the model’s core capabilities further, aiming to take over more tedious and complex tasks in software engineering and boost human productivity.
Intriguingly, the company also hinted at self-improving agent capabilities, calling it “an exciting and inspiring direction” that could redefine how AI agents learn and evolve on the job.
Qwen3-Coder will be available in multiple model sizes, including lighter versions aimed at reducing deployment costs while maintaining strong performance.
