China’s Alibaba has launched a major upgrade to its artificial intelligence chatbot. This marks a strong push into the consumer AI market.
The new app is based on the most advanced version of its Qwen large language model. It is available in China as a mobile application and website. An international version is set to be rolled out later, according to Reuters.
“With a single command, it can generate a full research report and automatically produce a polished, multi-slide PowerPoint presentation in seconds,” Alibaba said. The company also said in a statement that the Qwen App has entered public beta testing and is being billed as “the best personal AI assistant with the most powerful model.” Qwen is an upgraded and renamed version of the previous app, Tongyi.
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Alibaba said the updated app was the “most powerful official AI assistant for its models” and “the primary entry point for experiencing the latest and most powerful Qwen model,” in app-store descriptions.
Alibaba also plans to add agentic-AI features to the app to boost shopping on platforms including the main Taobao marketplace, according to Bloomberg.
This move represents a strategic shift for Alibaba, which has previously not invested heavily into developing its ChatGPT-style consumer app, instead focusing largely on enterprise customers as part of its cloud services offering.
This comes amid a price war in China’s AI domestic sector, triggered by DeepSeek, which has prioritized low-cost AI compute and app development. Alibaba’s moves also gave rise to concern in the U.S., according to some observers, as its heavy investments and rapid advancements placed it among the world’s top AI developers.
“Silicon Valley doesn’t want to admit it, but the symptoms are obvious: we’re witnessing a full-blown Qwen panic,” said Tulsi Soni, a marketing specialist, on social media on Saturday.
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A Financial Times report on Saturday also claimed that Alibaba was supplying China’s People’s Liberation Army with unspecified capabilities that the White House claimed would threaten U.S. national security, citing a memo that included declassified top-secret intelligence. Alibaba refuted the report, saying that the “assertions and innuendos” in the article were “completely false,” and called the report a “malicious PR operation clearly coming from a rogue voice looking to undermine President Trump’s recent trade deal with China.”
Earlier this year, Alibaba developed a new AI chip that could potentially replace Nvidia in China. According to the Wall Street Journal, the chip is more versatile than its older chips and is meant to serve a broader range of AI inference tasks.