Alibaba

Researchers documented an AI agent fleet running on Tencent Cloud that made more than 2,600 attempts to extract data from Alibaba mapping service Amap between September 28 and October 8. They traced requests, inspected agent inboxes and communicated with agents through a web mailbox. The report links infrastructure to Tencent but says the precise model remains uncertain, exposing how ordinary data-retrieval goals can lead agents to bypass access barriers.

Swarmchase ↗ · October 14 briefing

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked domestic companies including Alibaba Group and ByteDance to report how many of Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips they want to buy and what they would use them for, signaling Beijing may allow the purchases, The Information reported. The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell generation workstation GPU with 84 GB of memory that sits outside the data center accelerator category targeted by past rounds of US export controls. ByteDance alone is reportedly considering an order of roughly one million units, an amount that could absorb about two quarters of Nvidia's planned production for China. Approval would mark a notable loosening in China's approach to US AI hardware even as broader export restrictions remain in place.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 27 briefing

Alibaba unveiled its Zhenwu V900 AI chip, which it says delivers three times the performance of its predecessor and supports training clusters of up to 500,000 chips, with mass production targeted for early 2027. The company committed to spending more than $53 billion over three years on cloud and AI infrastructure, aiming to expand data center capacity past 20 gigawatts by 2032. Alibaba said its next flagship model, Qwen 4, is already in training.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 22 briefing

Alibaba is seeking to raise about $10 billion by selling new shares, its latest move to compete for global leadership in artificial intelligence; the share sale immediately drew criticism from investor Michael Burry.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 23 briefing

Alibaba reported a 75% plunge in June-quarter net income as AI capital expenditure soared 75% to about $10 billion. Revenue rose 9% and cloud sales jumped 45%, but the spending spike sent U. S. shares down around 5%.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 20 briefing

Alibaba released Qwen3.8-27B, a model small enough to run on a consumer laptop, and at the same time published the open weights for Qwen3.8 Max, its most powerful system. The company says the 27B model matches a model ten times its size on coding, professional tasks, research and multi-step agentic workflows. The launch lands one week after Meta open-sourced its strongest model and shipped laptop-class versions, putting the two rivals in direct competition for the same hardware. Hugging Face now counts 151,448 Qwen derivative models, roughly 2.6 times Meta's footprint.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 17 briefing

Apple published a guide letting Mac users in mainland China connect Alibaba's Qwen service to Siri and Writing Tools, routing Apple Intelligence features through a Chinese model. It requires macOS 26.6 or later, and users must opt in and sign in to a Qwen account, after which Siri can analyze photos and documents and Writing Tools can generate text or images. Apple's guide says Alibaba cannot use that material to train or improve its models. The move targets China's AI PC market, where Mac shipments fell 9% year over year in the first quarter to a 9% share against Lenovo's 31% and Huawei's 16%.

Reuters ↗ · August 9 briefing

Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max on Monday, a 2.4 trillion parameter mixture of experts model that activates about 95 billion parameters per query and handles text, images and video with a one million token context window. On the Arena. AI leaderboard it became the highest ranked Chinese model for text tasks and placed second globally on vision, trailing only Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Alibaba shares rose roughly 4.5 percent in New York premarket trading and about 7 percent in Hong Kong. The model is available through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, with open weights due to follow next week.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 3 briefing

Cisco's Foundation AI team has fingerprinted nearly 900 open models on Hugging Face to verify their true lineage, replacing the self-reported base model tags that uploaders type in and that are never substantiated through weight level analysis. The move responds to a growing provenance gap, as one report found that Alibaba's Qwen family is the declared parent of 69 percent of new open model derivatives as of early 2026, with Chinese labs accounting for about 70 percent overall. By offering free weight level verification, Cisco aims to replace unverified trust in a supply chain where security teams currently approve models based on unproven tags.

VentureBeat ↗ · July 30 briefing

Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based startup backed by Alibaba, released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-source model that the company says is the largest ever released, with benchmarks showing it rivals top proprietary systems from Anthropic and OpenAI. The model features a 1-million-token context window, native visual understanding, and an always-on reasoning mode, with full weights scheduled for release on July 27. On benchmarks such as GDPval-AA v2 and AA-Briefcase, K3 placed third and second respectively, while topping the BrowseComp long-horizon information-seeking benchmark and ranking first on Arena. AI's Frontend Code Arena.

VentureBeat ↗ · July 16 briefing

Apple received long-awaited approval from Chinese regulators to roll out Apple Intelligence in China, with Alibaba and Baidu serving as technical partners, potentially boosting Apple's handset sales in the world's most competitive smartphone market. The Cyberspace Administration of China published a notice confirming the license, granted alongside six other smartphone-based generative AI services, and Alibaba said its Qwen model will power Apple Intelligence text and image features for Chinese users. No launch date was announced, but approval typically precedes a rollout by only a few months, putting a China debut roughly in line with Apple's fall software cycle.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 15 briefing

The startup says it compressed Alibaba's Qwen3.6 27B model from roughly 54GB to under 4GB, letting its new Bonsai 27B model run fully on-device on Apple hardware via MLX at around 11 tokens per second, and its CEO says Apple is evaluating the technology. The compressed model reportedly retains more than 95% of full-precision benchmark performance while using up to 15 times less memory. The weights are available under an Apache 2.0 license, and a deal could accelerate Apple's push to run powerful AI locally on its devices.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 14 briefing

SK Hynix rose 13 percent on its first day of Nasdaq trading, closing at 168.01 dollars and pushing the memory chip maker past a trillion dollar valuation. The American depositary receipt offering raised 26.5 billion dollars, surpassing Alibaba's 2014 sale to become the largest US IPO by a foreign company. Chairman Chey Tae won told CNBC that demand for high bandwidth memory used in Nvidia AI chips is enormous and shows no sign of slowing, as AI agents and robots require large amounts of memory.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 12 briefing

An independent developer built a free public tool that lets users see and edit what an open source language model is thinking mid-generation, based on Anthropic's recent paper on verbalizable representations forming a shared workspace inside language models. The tool uses a technique the developer calls a Jacobian Lens to visualize concepts lighting up in the model's middle layers before it commits to a word, and lets users manually insert or suppress concepts to change the output in real time. Testing across models found the technique worked well on Qwen and Llama architectures but showed little benefit on Pythia models, regardless of size.

Hacker News ↗ · July 9 briefing

China plans to allow its top artificial intelligence companies to buy a limited amount of Nvidia H200 chips, according to a report from the Information, marking a notable easing of Beijing's restrictions on the coveted US made hardware. Chinese officials have told firms including Alibaba, ByteDance, and DeepSeek that they can apply to purchase some of the processors, though each company must specify how many chips it needs and justify the request to gain approval. The shift comes as Chinese tech firms face a severe computing capacity crunch that domestic chipmakers have been unable to resolve, even though the US government had already licensed roughly 10 Chinese firms to buy the H200s.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 8 briefing

Chinese authorities have held meetings with major domestic AI firms over the past month about potentially restricting overseas access to the country's most advanced AI models, including ones not yet released, according to Reuters. Companies involved in the talks include Alibaba, whose Qwen model is among China's most widely used, and the startup Z.ai, whose GLM-5.2 model is seen as approaching the capability of leading U. S. systems at a fraction of the cost. A summary of the discussions published in an official Supreme People's Court journal proposed a tiered system: basic open source tools would need only a simple filing, more advanced technology would face security reviews, and the most sensitive frontier models would be barred from public release or restricted to domestic use. Officials also discussed making theft of proprietary AI technology a national security offense and floated new curbs on who can fund domestic AI startups.

Reuters Technology ↗ · July 7 briefing

Alibaba has classified Anthropic's Claude Code as high-risk software and banned employees from using it starting July 10, directing staff to its in-house Qoder tool instead. The move escalates a feud that began when Anthropic accused operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen lab of running the largest known model distillation attack against Claude, using roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to run nearly 28.8 million exchanges over about six weeks. The ban followed a viral Reddit post claiming Claude Code had quietly shipped China-detection logic since April, which Anthropic described as an anti-abuse experiment it had been meaning to remove.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 6 briefing

VentureBeat ↗ · June 22 briefing

Alibaba's Qwen team released RobotSuite: three embodied AI models covering manipulation (RobotManip), video world modeling (RobotWorld), and navigation (RobotNav) across multiple parameter sizes.

AI Research News ↗ · June 16 briefing

SpaceX disclosed Wednesday that it plans to raise $75 billion in its initial public offering, which is expected to occur within a few weeks. Why it matters: This would be the largest IPO ever, and it's not even close. The current global record is $29.4 billion by Saudi oil giant Aramco in late 2019, while the U. S. exchange mark was set in 2014 by China's Alibaba with $25 billion. Zoom in: SpaceX says that it plans to offer 555.6 million shares at $135 per share. It would be valued at about $1.75 tri...

Axios ↗ · June 3 briefing

A key company behind Thailand’s national AI effort is suspected of helping to smuggle billions of dollars worth of Super Micro Computer Inc. servers containing advanced Nvidia Corp. chips to China, with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. one of multiple end customers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 10 briefing

Pinterest uses a multimodal generative AI strategy to lower computing costs. Their approach includes OpenAI's and Alibaba's large language models.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · April 30 briefing

Startup Shengshu plans to use the money for a "general world model," paving the way for more practical robot applications.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 12 briefing

While much of the attention has focused on GPUs, an area Nvidia dominates, CPUs are seen as key for AI inferencing and agents.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 24 briefing

Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen3.5-397B, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 17B active parameters and a massive 1M token context window, specifically optimized for long-horizon reasoning in AI agents.

MarkTechPost ↗ · February 17 briefing

The Qwen team released Qwen3-Coder-Next, an 80B parameter sparse MoE model designed specifically for coding agents and local development, matching top-tier proprietary performance.

AI Research News ↗ · February 5 briefing

Alibaba has released a technical report showing Qwen3-VL beats GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro on visual tasks and achieves 100% accuracy on needle-in-a-haystack tests for 30-minute videos.

The Decoder ↗ · November 30 briefing

Alibaba and ByteDance shift development to south-east Asia to sidestep US curbs

Financial Times Tech ↗ · November 27 briefing

This surge in user interest reflects a broader shift: Chinese tech giants are accelerating their push into AI-native consumer products. Alibaba's recently launched Qwen AI app has demonstrated remarkable market traction, accumulating 10 million downloads in the seven days since its public beta release.

TechRepublic ↗ · November 24 briefing