Qwen 3.5 Blog - One API Access 500+ AI Models

Mar 19, 2026

How to Use Qwen 3.5 API

On Lunar New Year’s Eve (Feb 16–17, 2026), Alibaba Group released its next-generation model, Qwen 3.5 — a multimodal, agent-capable model positioned for what the company calls an “agentic AI” era. Industry coverage highlighted claims of large gains in efficiency and cost, and rapid support from hardware and cloud vendors. CometAPI is options for developers who want hosted API access or an OpenAI-compatible integration, while AMD announced Day-0 GPU support for the model on its Instinct line. ByteDance is one of the principal domestic competitors that released upgrades around the same holiday window. OpenAI remains a reference point for comparison in benchmarks and integration style.

Qwen-3.5 on Lunar New Year — does it beat the closed-source top tier in 2026

Alibaba’s new Qwen3.5 is a major step forward — it closes the gap with, and in some agentic / multimodal workloads claims parity or advantage over, certain frontier closed-source models on a number of public benchmarks and internal tests. However, “outperform” depends on the workload: on agentic tool-use, multimodal document/video understanding, and cost-per-inference Qwen3.5 is reported to be extremely competitive (and in some vendor charts ahead). The practical takeaway: Qwen3.5 appears to be a genuine frontier contender in early 2026 — for many enterprise agentic and multimodal use cases it is now viable as a primary option.