Alibaba News & Updates
Last updated October 18, 2026
Alibaba overtakes Meituan in China’s instant retail market as the platforms swap coupon subsidies for warehouse buildouts
Thomson Reuters launches its own AI model, adapted from Alibaba’s Qwen, to cut what it pays frontier labs like OpenAI and Google
Alibaba says its Qwen open-weight models passed 3B downloads in six months, far ahead of Google’s and Meta’s 2026 totals
Ant International raises $1.2B from investors including Ant Group and Alibaba to expand merchant payments and enterprise services
Alibaba bans employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code as of July 10, citing security risks, after the distillation-attack accusation
Anthropic accuses Alibaba of illicitly accessing Claude through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to copy its AI in an “adversarial distillation” campaign
PDD Holdings shares tumble 10% as Q1 profits drop 15% amid China’s sluggish economy and intense competition from JD, Alibaba, Douyin
Alibaba launches two closed-source AI models as it pivots from open-source to paid enterprise offerings
Alibaba releases Qwen3.5-Omni as a proprietary model, breaking from its open-source strategy
Alibaba CEO targets $100B in annual cloud and AI revenue within five years as e-commerce growth stalls
Alibaba consolidates all AI operations under new business unit called Alibaba Token Hub
Tencent builds a top-secret AI agent for its 1.4 billion-user WeChat app to rival Alibaba and ByteDance
Alibaba launches Qwen AI smart glasses with heads-up displays starting at $275 ahead of a global rollout
Alibaba head of Qwen AI division Lin Junyang resigns as mobile app users surge to 203 million
Alibaba unveils Qwen 3.5 to power complex agentic AI tasks
ByteDance, Alibaba race to launch new AI models in China
Alibaba’s Cainiao to buy stake in Zelostech at $2B valuation
Alibaba prepares IPO for AI chip unit T-Head
Alibaba upgrades Qwen app to execute tasks like ordering food
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