Alibaba has unveiled Qwen3.5, a new multimodal AI model that the company says is intended to serve as a foundation for digital agents capable of advanced reasoning and tool use across applications. The release reflects the ongoing shift from standalone chatbot deployments toward AI systems that can execute multi-step workflows and operate with minimal human prompting. In a blog post, Alibaba highlighted gains across selected benchmarks, claiming Qwen3.5 outperformed earlier versions and competing frontier systems such as GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5 Opus, and Gemini 3 Pro.