Alibaba's U.S.-listed shares gained 3% in overnight trading while HK-listed shares rose 4%. Alibaba's AI assistant Qwen App has exceeded 10 million downloads within just one week of its public beta launch, outpacing competitors like ChatGPT, Sora, and DeepSeek to become the fastest-growing AI application in history.

Since its full open-source release in 2023, Alibaba's Qwen model has surpassed rivals such as Llama and DeepSeek, emerging as the world's most powerful and widely adopted open-source large language model. To date, the Qwen series has accumulated over 600 million global downloads. The recently launched flagship model, Qwen3-Max, now ranks among the top three globally in performance, outperforming international competitors like GPT5 and Claude Opus 4.

After building significant momentum in open-source and enterprise markets, Alibaba unexpectedly initiated the public beta for Qwen App on November 17, quickly capturing mass-market adoption. Within just three days of launch, the app soared into the top three of Apple's App Store free charts and surpassed 10 million downloads in a single week.

Alibaba's management views Qwen as a "decisive battle for the AI era," with large language models now entering the Agentic AI phase — capable of assisting humans. This presents an ideal opportunity for Alibaba to establish a consumer-facing AI gateway.

The company has positioned Qwen App as a "personal AI assistant that chats and gets things done," planning deep integration with its e-commerce, mapping, and local services ecosystems. The focus remains on enhancing Agentic capabilities — enabling AI not just to understand and generate content but also to collaborate across scenarios and execute tasks seamlessly.