Alibaba Debuts Most Advanced Open-Source AI Coding Model Yet

• Qwen3-Coder, a 480B-parameter model, excels in agentic coding benchmarks like SWE-bench-Verified.
• Open-source Qwen Code tool enhances Qwen3-Coder with custom prompts and developer tool integration.
• Alibaba explores self-improving Coding Agent and cost-effective model sizes for broader deployment.

Alibaba Group announced the launch of Qwen3-Coder, an open-source artificial intelligence model tailored for software development, hailed as the company’s most sophisticated coding tool to date. This release underscores the intensifying global AI race, with Chinese tech giants vying to match the advancements of their Western counterparts by rolling out increasingly powerful models.

Qwen3-Coder, a 480B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 35B active parameters, boasts native support for a 256,000-token context window, scalable to 1 million tokens through extrapolation. Available in multiple sizes, Alibaba highlighted this model as its "most powerful" yet, achieving top-tier performance among open-source models on benchmarks like SWE-bench-Verified. “It achieves top-tier performance across multiple agentic coding benchmarks among open models, including SWE-bench-Verified,” stated an X post by Qwen.

Alongside the model, Alibaba introduced Qwen Code, an open-source command-line tool for agentic coding, divided from Gemini Code. The tool includes custom prompts and function call protocols to maximize Qwen3-Coder’s capabilities. “Qwen3-Coder works seamlessly with the community’s best developer tools. As a foundation model, we hope it can be used anywhere across the digital world Agentic Coding in the World,” the X post added. This integration aims to enhance developer workflows by leveraging community-driven tools.

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A company blog post reports that Alibaba is improving Qwen3-Coder in several dimensions on its core functionality. The company is also considering smaller size models to strike balance between performance and less-costly deployment to ensure the technology becomes more affordable. Additionally, Alibaba is investigating self-improvement capabilities for the Coding Agent, describing it as “an exciting and inspiring direction” that could push the boundaries of AI-driven software development.