Alibaba Qwen release history.

Alibaba has shipped 25 major model releases and 5 other major launches since Tongyi Qianwen arrived in April 2023. The latest model recorded here is Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, announced 26 Aug 2026. Every entry is dated from Alibaba’s own announcement and links to it.

30 MAJOR RELEASES2023–2026CHECKED 23 SEP 2026
NEWEST NEXT
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next · 26 Aug 2026
NEWEST OPEN WEIGHTS
Qwen3.8 open weights · 12 Aug 2026
NEWEST MAX
Qwen3.8-Max · 3 Aug 2026
NEWEST PLUS
Qwen3.7-Plus · 3 Jun 2026
NEWEST VL & OMNI
Qwen3-Omni · 22 Sep 2025
NEWEST CODER
Qwen3-Coder and Qwen Code · 22 Jul 2025
§ 02 — MODELS

Every Qwen model release.

25 model releases, newest first. “Current” is the newest release in its line; older ones are superseded, and retired ones have left Alibaba’s apps or API. Where a model is in our benchmark tables, the last column links to its scores, price in AUD and Australian availability.

MODEL RELEASES25 RELEASES
Qwen model releases, newest first
RELEASEANNOUNCEDLINESTATUSBENCHMARKS
Qwen3.8-Flash-NextNextCURRENTQwen3.8 Flash Next
Qwen3.8 open weightsOpen weightsCURRENTQwen3.8 27B
Qwen3.8-MaxMaxCURRENTQwen3.8 Max
Qwen3.7-PlusPlusCURRENT
Qwen3.7-MaxMaxSUPERSEDED
Qwen3.6-PlusPlusSUPERSEDED
Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.5-PlusOpen weights · PlusSUPERSEDED
Qwen3-Max-ThinkingMaxSUPERSEDED
Qwen3-MaxMaxSUPERSEDED
Qwen3-OmniVL & OmniCURRENT
Qwen3-NextNextSUPERSEDED
Qwen3-Coder and Qwen CodeCoderCURRENT
Qwen3WATERSHEDOpen weightsSUPERSEDED
Qwen2.5-OmniVL & OmniSUPERSEDED
QwQ-32BQwQ reasoningSUPERSEDED
Qwen2.5-MaxMaxSUPERSEDED
Qwen2.5-VLVL & OmniSUPERSEDED
QwQ-32B-PreviewQwQ reasoningSUPERSEDED
Qwen2.5-Coder 32BCoderSUPERSEDED
Qwen2.5Open weightsSUPERSEDED
Qwen2Open weightsSUPERSEDED
Qwen1.5Open weightsSUPERSEDED
Tongyi Qianwen 2.0MaxSUPERSEDED
Qwen-7B open weightsOpen weightsSUPERSEDED
Tongyi Qianwen unveiledWATERSHEDMaxSUPERSEDED
§ 03 — TIMELINE

Every major release, year by year.

30 OF 30

202611 RELEASES

  1. MODEL

    Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • CURRENT
    • QWEN3.8 AND QWENWORK

    The Qwen team opens the weights of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B multimodal MoE with 6B active parameters that previews the Qwen4 architecture, adding sparse attention, gated residuals and n-gram embeddings. It powers QwenWork’s Standard mode and is on Qwen Cloud.

    Why it mattered. Like Qwen3-Next before Qwen3.5, it shows developers the next generation’s architecture before the full family ships.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · API · QwenWork
  2. MODEL

    Qwen3.8 open weights

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • CURRENT
    • QWEN3.8 AND QWENWORK

    Alibaba publishes Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, the text-only base of Qwen3.8-Max, on Hugging Face and ModelScope, then Qwen3.8-27B on 14 August, a dense multimodal model under Apache 2.0 with 262K native context extendable to 1M.

    Why it mattered. The Qwen team says Qwen3.8 brings a Max-class model to open release for the first time.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights
    BENCHMARKS
    Qwen3.8 27B →
  3. AGENT

    QwenWork

    • BETA
    • QWEN3.8 AND QWENWORK

    Alibaba opens a public beta in China of QwenWork, a workplace agent platform that combines desktop, cloud and team agents, with a web interface and desktop client, individual and enterprise editions on subscription plus credits, and four model tiers, with Qwen3.8 available from launch.

    Why it mattered. QwenWork gave Qwen a dedicated product for delegating office work to agents, separate from the chat app.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Web · Desktop · China
  4. MODEL

    Qwen3.8-Max

    • LAUNCHED
    • CURRENT
    • QWEN3.8 AND QWENWORK

    Alibaba launches Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter MoE model with 95B active parameters and a 1M-token context, through Model Studio and QwenWork. A 2 September snapshot, qwen3.8-max-0902, improved coding, multi-tool agents and vision.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3.8-Max is Alibaba’s largest model to date, built for coding, long-horizon execution and office work.

    AVAILABLE TO
    API · QwenWork
    BENCHMARKS
    Qwen3.8 Max →
  5. MODEL

    Qwen3.7-Plus

    • LAUNCHED
    • CURRENT
    • AGENTIC 3.5 TO 3.7

    Qwen3.7-Plus is released as a multimodal agent model that combines GUI and command-line actions in one loop, reading screens, generating code from visual references and navigating mobile apps, with a 1M-token context in Model Studio.

    Why it mattered. It brought the Qwen3.7 generation’s agent skills to a cheaper model that can also see and operate interfaces.

    AVAILABLE TO
    API
  6. PLATFORM

    Qwen Cloud

    • LAUNCHED
    • AGENTIC 3.5 TO 3.7

    Alibaba Cloud launches Qwen Cloud for global markets in Singapore, an AI-native platform for text, vision, image, video, speech and embedding models with Skills for agents, a CLI and a website, plus a Token Plan subscription at a fixed monthly fee.

    Why it mattered. Qwen Cloud gave international developers a Qwen-branded home for every model and a flat-fee plan, rather than pay-as-you-go only.

    AVAILABLE TO
    API · Token Plan · Global
  7. MODEL

    Qwen3.7-Max

    • LAUNCHED
    • SUPERSEDED
    • AGENTIC 3.5 TO 3.7

    Alibaba announces Qwen3.7-Max for agentic coding, reasoning and long-horizon tasks, saying it can run autonomously for up to 35 hours and more than 1,000 tool calls. It has a 1M-token context and reached global developers through Model Studio.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3.7-Max pitched the flagship as a backbone for long-running agents in tools such as Claude Code and Qwen Code.

    AVAILABLE TO
    API
  8. MODEL

    Qwen3.6-Plus

    • LAUNCHED
    • SUPERSEDED
    • AGENTIC 3.5 TO 3.7

    Alibaba releases Qwen3.6-Plus with a 1M-token context by default, stronger agentic coding and visual coding from screenshots and wireframes, through Model Studio and Qwen Chat, and says selected Qwen3.6 models will be open-sourced. The first, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, followed on 16 April.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3.6-Plus focused the hosted model on repository-scale coding agents for enterprises and Alibaba’s own apps.

    AVAILABLE TO
    API · Qwen Chat · Qwen app
  9. MODEL

    Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.5-Plus

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • AGENTIC 3.5 TO 3.7

    Alibaba open-sources Qwen3.5-397B-A17B under Apache 2.0, a natively multimodal model with a hybrid linear-attention and sparse MoE design that supports 201 languages and dialects. The hosted Qwen3.5-Plus adds a 1M-token context and built-in tools in Model Studio and Qwen Chat; smaller sizes followed in February and March.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3.5 merged vision and language into the main model family, so one open model handles text, images and video.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · Qwen Chat · API
  10. MODEL

    Qwen3-Max-Thinking

    • LAUNCHED
    • SUPERSEDED
    • TRILLION-SCALE MAX AND THE QWEN APP

    Alibaba releases Qwen3-Max-Thinking, the reasoning version of its trillion-parameter flagship, which decides for itself when to search, use memory or run its code interpreter. It is live in Qwen Chat and by API as qwen3-max-2026-01-23.

    Why it mattered. It gave the Max flagship built-in, adaptive tool use, so users no longer pick tools by hand.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Qwen Chat · API
  11. AGENT

    Qwen app agentic tasks

    • BETA
    • TRILLION-SCALE MAX AND THE QWEN APP

    The Qwen app starts public testing in China of tasks it completes itself: ordering food through Taobao Instant Commerce, booking flights and hotels through Fliggy, shopping on Taobao, routing with Amap and paying in chat with Alipay. An invite-only Task Assistant handles longer workflows.

    Why it mattered. It turned the app from an assistant that answers into one that acts across Alibaba’s shopping, travel and payment services.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Qwen app · China

202510 RELEASES

  1. PRODUCT

    Qwen app

    • BETA
    • TRILLION-SCALE MAX AND THE QWEN APP

    Alibaba launches the Qwen app in public beta, free to users in China on iOS, Android, web and PC and powered by Qwen3, with deep research, coding, camera and voice-call features. It passed 10 million downloads in its first week.

    Why it mattered. The Qwen app became Alibaba’s main consumer assistant, a direct home for its flagship models rather than a feature inside other apps.

    AVAILABLE TO
    iOS · Android · Web · PC · China
  2. MODEL

    Qwen3-Max

    • LAUNCHED
    • SUPERSEDED
    • TRILLION-SCALE MAX AND THE QWEN APP

    At Apsara Conference 2025, Alibaba releases Qwen3-Max, its largest model with over 1 trillion parameters, in Instruct and Thinking versions, available in Qwen Chat and through Model Studio as qwen3-max.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3-Max took Alibaba’s proprietary flagship to trillion-parameter scale, aimed at coding and agent work.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Qwen Chat · API
  3. MODEL

    Qwen3-Omni

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • CURRENT
    • TRILLION-SCALE MAX AND THE QWEN APP

    Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B is released under Apache 2.0 as a natively end-to-end omni-modal model that takes text, image, audio and video input and streams text and speech output, with speech input in 19 languages.

    Why it mattered. It carried Qwen’s any-input, voice-output model to the Qwen3 generation as open weights.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights
  4. MODEL

    Qwen3-Next

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • TRILLION-SCALE MAX AND THE QWEN APP

    Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B is released under Apache 2.0, combining Gated DeltaNet and gated attention with a highly sparse MoE that activates 3B of 80B parameters. The Qwen team says it outperforms Qwen3-32B-Base at about 10% of the training cost.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3-Next previewed the efficient hybrid architecture that Qwen3.5 and later series were built on.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · API
  5. MODEL

    Qwen3-Coder and Qwen Code

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • CURRENT
    • REASONING AND HYBRID THINKING

    Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct is released as an open agentic coding model with 256K native context, extendable to 1M, alongside Qwen Code, a command-line coding agent adapted from Gemini CLI. The Qwen team says it is comparable to Claude Sonnet 4 on agentic coding.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3-Coder and Qwen Code gave developers an open model and a terminal agent for long, multi-step coding tasks.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · API · Qwen Code
  6. MODEL

    Qwen3

    • WATERSHED
    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • REASONING AND HYBRID THINKING

    Qwen3 launches under Apache 2.0 with two MoE models, 235B-A22B and 30B-A3B, and six dense models from 0.6B to 32B. Each can switch between a thinking mode and a fast mode, supports 119 languages and dialects, and was pretrained on about 36 trillion tokens.

    Why it mattered. Qwen3 put switchable reasoning into one open-weights family at every size, replacing the separate QwQ line.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · Qwen Chat · API
  7. MODEL

    Qwen2.5-Omni

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • REASONING AND HYBRID THINKING

    Qwen2.5-Omni-7B takes text, image, audio and video input and replies in text and streaming speech, using a Thinker-Talker design for real-time voice and video chat, with open weights and access in Qwen Chat.

    Why it mattered. It was Qwen’s first end-to-end omni model, a single small model that can see, listen and talk.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · Qwen Chat
  8. MODEL

    QwQ-32B

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • REASONING AND HYBRID THINKING

    QwQ-32B is released under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face, ModelScope and Qwen Chat. The Qwen team says scaled reinforcement learning gives it performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1 with far fewer parameters, and adds tool use to its reasoning.

    Why it mattered. It brought R1-class reasoning to a 32B model that many developers could run on their own hardware.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · Qwen Chat
  9. MODEL

    Qwen2.5-Max

    • LAUNCHED
    • SUPERSEDED
    • REASONING AND HYBRID THINKING

    Alibaba introduces Qwen2.5-Max, a large mixture-of-experts model pretrained on over 20 trillion tokens, available in Qwen Chat and by API as qwen-max-2025-01-25. The Qwen team says it outperforms DeepSeek V3 on benchmarks including Arena-Hard and LiveCodeBench.

    Why it mattered. Qwen2.5-Max set up Max as Alibaba’s proprietary flagship tier, separate from the open-weights family.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Qwen Chat · API
  10. MODEL

    Qwen2.5-VL

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • REASONING AND HYBRID THINKING

    Qwen2.5-VL launches in 3B, 7B and 72B sizes, adding visual agent abilities for computer and phone use, structured document parsing and understanding of videos over an hour long.

    Why it mattered. It made Qwen’s open vision models useful for agents that read screens and documents, not just describe images.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · Qwen Chat

20246 RELEASES

  1. MODEL

    QwQ-32B-Preview

    • PREVIEW
    • SUPERSEDED
    • OPEN MODEL FAMILIES

    The Qwen team releases QwQ-32B-Preview, an experimental open reasoning model that thinks at length before answering, scoring 50.0 on AIME and 90.6 on MATH-500, with known issues such as language mixing and reasoning loops.

    Why it mattered. QwQ was Qwen’s first reasoning model and one of the first open-weights models of that kind.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights
  2. MODEL

    1M-token context in Qwen2.5-Turbo

    • LAUNCHED
    • OPEN MODEL FAMILIES

    Qwen2.5-Turbo extends the context window to 1 million tokens, cutting time to first token on a full-length input from 4.9 minutes to 68 seconds, at an unchanged price through the Model Studio API.

    Why it mattered. A million-token window let users feed whole novels, code repositories and stacks of papers into a single Qwen request.

    AVAILABLE TO
    API
  3. MODEL

    Qwen2.5-Coder 32B

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • OPEN MODEL FAMILIES

    The Qwen2.5-Coder series is completed in six sizes up to 32B. The Qwen team says Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct is the best open-source model on several code generation benchmarks and competitive with GPT-4o.

    Why it mattered. It gave developers an open coding model they could run themselves in tools such as Cursor, and started Qwen’s dedicated coder line.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights
  4. MODEL

    Qwen2.5

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • OPEN MODEL FAMILIES

    Alibaba releases Qwen2.5 from 0.5B to 72B, pretrained on up to 18 trillion tokens, alongside Qwen2.5-Coder and Qwen2.5-Math, with Qwen-Plus and Qwen-Turbo offered by API through Model Studio.

    Why it mattered. Qwen2.5 lifted knowledge, coding and maths scores across a very wide range of sizes, making the family a common base for fine-tuning.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · API
  5. MODEL

    Qwen2

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • OPEN MODEL FAMILIES

    Qwen2 arrives in five sizes from 0.5B to 72B, including a 57B-A14B MoE model, trained on 27 languages beyond English and Chinese, with up to 128K context and Apache 2.0 licences for every size except 72B.

    Why it mattered. Qwen2 improved coding and maths and moved most of the family to a permissive licence, widening commercial use.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights
  6. MODEL

    Qwen1.5

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • OPEN MODEL FAMILIES

    The Qwen team releases Qwen1.5, base and chat models from 0.5B to 72B parameters with a 32K context window, supported directly in Hugging Face Transformers and offered through the DashScope API.

    Why it mattered. Qwen1.5 made Qwen far easier to run with standard open-source tooling, and became the base for the later 32B, 110B and MoE additions.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights · API

20233 RELEASES

  1. MODEL

    Tongyi Qianwen 2.0

    • LAUNCHED
    • SUPERSEDED
    • TONGYI QIANWEN

    At its Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud releases Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 with a few hundred billion parameters, available to the public through its website and mobile app and to developers by API, alongside industry-specific models and a GenAI service platform.

    Why it mattered. Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 moved the proprietary flagship from enterprise beta to a public assistant and API.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Web · App · API
  2. MODEL

    Qwen-7B open weights

    • OPEN WEIGHTS
    • SUPERSEDED
    • TONGYI QIANWEN

    Alibaba releases Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat on ModelScope and Hugging Face, its first open-weights Qwen models, followed by Qwen-14B in September and Qwen-72B in November.

    Why it mattered. Open weights put Qwen in the hands of researchers and developers worldwide and began the open model family Alibaba is now best known for.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Open weights
  3. PRODUCT

    Tongyi Qianwen unveiled

    • WATERSHED
    • BETA
    • SUPERSEDED
    • TONGYI QIANWEN

    Alibaba Cloud unveils Tongyi Qianwen, a large language model with Chinese and English capabilities, opening it to enterprise customers in China for beta testing and planning to deploy it first in DingTalk and Tmall Genie.

    Why it mattered. Tongyi Qianwen was Alibaba’s entry into ChatGPT-style assistants and the start of the model line that became Qwen.

    AVAILABLE TO
    Enterprise beta · China
§ 04 — ERAS

6 eras of Qwen.

  1. ERA 01APRIL 2023OCTOBER 2023

    Tongyi Qianwen

    Alibaba Cloud unveils Tongyi Qianwen for enterprise beta, open-sources Qwen-7B and ships Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 to the public on web and mobile.

    3 releases, from Tongyi Qianwen unveiled
  2. ERA 02FEBRUARY 2024NOVEMBER 2024

    Open model families

    Qwen1.5, Qwen2 and Qwen2.5 build out a wide open-weights family, with Qwen2.5-Coder, a 1M-token Qwen2.5-Turbo and the first QwQ reasoning preview.

    6 releases, from Qwen1.5
  3. ERA 03JANUARY 2025JULY 2025

    Reasoning and hybrid thinking

    Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen2.5-Max, QwQ-32B and Qwen2.5-Omni lead into Qwen3’s hybrid thinking models and the agentic Qwen3-Coder.

    6 releases, from Qwen2.5-VL
  4. ERA 04SEPTEMBER 2025JANUARY 2026

    Trillion-scale Max and the Qwen app

    Qwen3-Next, Qwen3-Omni and the trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max arrive, and the Qwen app launches in China and gains agentic shopping and travel tasks.

    6 releases, from Qwen3-Next
  5. ERA 05FEBRUARY 2026JUNE 2026

    Agentic 3.5 to 3.7

    Natively multimodal Qwen3.5, then Qwen3.6-Plus, Qwen3.7-Max and Qwen3.7-Plus push towards long-running agents, and Qwen Cloud opens for global developers.

    5 releases, from Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.5-Plus
  6. ERA 06AUGUST 2026NOW

    Qwen3.8 and QwenWork

    Qwen3.8-Max and QwenWork launch together, the Max-class model’s weights are opened, and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next previews the Qwen4 architecture.

    4 releases, from Qwen3.8-Max
§ 05 — QUESTIONS

Qwen releases, answered.

As of our 23 Sep 2026 review, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, announced by Alibaba on 26 Aug 2026. The Qwen team opens the weights of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B multimodal MoE with 6B active parameters that previews the Qwen4 architecture, adding sparse attention, gated residuals and n-gram embeddings. It powers QwenWork’s Standard mode and is on Qwen Cloud.

11 Apr 2023: Tongyi Qianwen unveiled. Alibaba Cloud unveils Tongyi Qianwen, a large language model with Chinese and English capabilities, opening it to enterprise customers in China for beta testing and planning to deploy it first in DingTalk and Tmall Genie.

As of 23 Sep 2026, the newest release in each line is: Qwen3-Coder and Qwen Code (22 Jul 2025), Qwen3-Omni (22 Sep 2025), Qwen3.7-Plus (3 Jun 2026), Qwen3.8-Max (3 Aug 2026), Qwen3.8 open weights (12 Aug 2026) and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (26 Aug 2026). Older models in those lines have been superseded, and some have been retired from Alibaba’s apps.

30 on this timeline: 25 model releases and 5 product, platform, agent and plan launches. It leaves out incremental updates, settings and feature drops — only releases that changed what Qwen could do or who could use it.

Qwen3.8 Max: None of the major cloud platforms offer it in an Australian region yet. Qwen3.8 27B: Its weights are public, so it can be hosted in Australia on your own infrastructure or an Australian cloud region. Qwen3.8 Flash Next: Its weights are public, so it can be hosted in Australia on your own infrastructure or an Australian cloud region. Our benchmark pages track Australian cloud availability for each model weekly.

Dates are the day Alibaba announced each release, taken from Alibaba’s own site and documentation.

Major releases only: new models, products, plans and capability launches. Retirements are noted on the model they retired.

Checked 23 Sep 2026 · How the current models compare →

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