Tech Desk 
Jul 23, 2025
Alibaba Group is back in the race to develop AI coding tools with the introduction of Qwen3-Coder, its most advanced open-source artificial intelligence model for software development.
The company announced the tool on Wednesday as part of Alibaba's plans to lead in the fast-moving world of AI.
Alibaba's Qwen3-coder features
Qwen3-Coder is designed to support tasks related to coding; that means it can write code, finish complex programming workflows, and, in some cases, do some jobs autonomously.
This lands it in the subset of agentic AI coding models, tools that can think and act autonomously to solve programming problems.
The company believes that Qwen3-Coder has an edge over other Chinese AI models, such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's K2.
In fact, Alibaba says Qwen3-Coder is capable of competing with recognisable models from the US, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude, regarding some aspects of coding ability.
This announcement demonstrates that major Chinese tech firms, such as Alibaba, still see a future for open-source AI and will invest heavily in developing open-source AI models to remain competitive globally.
Moreover, even if it is up to each foreign tech developer to build on the tool, giving developers everywhere the opportunity to use it, make improvements to it ultimately leads to greater impact on the technology industry overall.
