Alibaba is preparing for a significant move in the field of artificial intelligence, with a comprehensive plan to upgrade its main AI app in the coming months—a step intended to make it more similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and position the company competitively against technology giants in China and worldwide. According to reports, Alibaba will begin updating the existing “Tongyi” apps on iOS and Android, and will then rename them “Qwen,” after the well-known AI model it developed.
Later on, Alibaba will gradually add “agentic” AI capabilities—smart-agent abilities—that will help users make purchases on platforms such as Taobao. The ultimate goal is to turn Qwen into a full AI agent capable of acting on behalf of the user and performing complex tasks, a trend currently leading the AI race both in the U.S. and China. In recent months, the company has invested more than one hundred developers in the project, as part of the expanded AI investments hinted at by Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu in September.
The move marks one of Alibaba’s most prominent attempts to generate revenue from consumer-oriented services, and not only from business-oriented ones. In recent years, Alibaba has joined the race to develop advanced AI models, alongside players such as Minimax, ByteDance, and Tencent—all striving to approach the performance of OpenAI and DeepSeek. However, unlike the U.S. market, consumers in China are less inclined to pay for digital services, which creates challenges in monetization. For now, Qwen is less popular than systems such as ByteDance’s Doubao and Tencent’s Yuanbao. Integrating shopping features into the Qwen app may enable Alibaba to leverage its traditional strength in e-commerce to attract users.
Alongside the “Tongyi” apps, the company also operates “Qwen Chat” on iOS and Android, but it currently offers less functionality. The goal now is to unify all services under the Qwen brand and create one central app that will become the flagship tool for mobile users. The new version of Qwen will remain free at this stage, but building a large user base may allow Alibaba to charge in the future for advanced services.
In the background of the move are major Chinese tech giants, including Huawei and Tencent, which are investing huge sums in AI development as part of a global competition against OpenAI, Google, and Meta. Alibaba, for its part, seeks not only to develop software capabilities but also to create infrastructure—such as chips and “full-stack” technologies—that will serve as the foundation for the future of artificial intelligence.
This is not the first time Alibaba has attempted to bring its AI capabilities to consumers. Earlier this year, it upgraded its Quark search app to turn it into a broad-capability AI assistant, and it will continue operating alongside Qwen. At this stage, financial reports indicate that the investments are paying off: Alibaba reported triple-digit growth in AI products, and its cloud division recorded higher-than-expected sales and became the fastest-growing unit in the group.