Alibaba
Lineage
- Assistant
- Qwen
- Model families
- Qwen MaxQwen (open models)Qwen Plus
- Headquarters and founding
- Hangzhou, China (holding company in the Cayman Islands); founded in 1999
- Leadership
- Eddie Wu, chief executive of Alibaba; Zhou Jingren, chief AI architect
Founding and headquarters: Alibaba, annual report 20-F 2026 (SEC, 20/5/2026), 9 November 2026 ↗
Alibaba's assistant
The assistants ranking →QwenAssistant · Celsius score39out of 100, 7th out of 10Performance49Ethics34Environment33The assistant profile →Alibaba's models
Alibaba's models, general intelligence and release date
Epoch AI ECI index and its 95% interval; 9 models released in 2026 and measured by the ECI index; 13 models measured in all, in the "Table" tab
Dot: the index measured, at the release dateLine: the 95% interval
Sources: Epoch AI, "Capabilities & benchmarking", ECI index and APEX-Agents. CC BY 4.0 licence.
An underlined name links to the model profile; the others are below the threshold for a profile (3 public measurements, or a place in the top 10 of a benchmark).
Governance and safety
- Company governance
- Alibaba added in June 2026 to the Pentagon's list of companies linked to the Chinese military, which it is contesting in court.
- Model safety
- Grade D- from the Future of Life Institute (summer 2026), neither the Seoul commitments nor the European code; but Qwen 3.7 Max 8th of the 67 models ranked by Phare (7/2026) and 9% blackmail in Anthropic's test (6/2025).
Electricity and environmental approach
- Decarbonised electricity
- Servers mostly in China (525 g CO₂e/kWh), offset by 73.6% "clean" electricity in Alibaba Cloud's data centres.
- Company's environmental approach
- Aegaeon: 82% fewer GPUs to serve the same models (2025); nothing per query; SBTi commitment withdrawn.
Methodology: the ranking criteria ; the electricity use of a task for its models is a Projet Celsius estimate, based on the electricity use ofwriting 1,000 tokens (AI Impact Database).
Scores and facts: assistants ranking, scores as of 11/11/2026 (methodology 1.1), sources on the Qwen page. Models: Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0).
Continue in the ranking
The full ranking →AssistantQwen39out of 100, 7th out of 10Scores, plans, models, data and environment.The entry →ModelAlibabaQwen3.8 Max29thout of 71 on general intelligenceAlibaba's best-ranked model on general intelligence.The entry →
CompanyPerplexityNo model of its own measured; Perplexity serves those of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and SpaceX Super Intelligence.The entry →The hub newsletter
This month's ranking, news on the impact of AI and one figure from the AI Impact Database. One newsletter a month at most, free of charge. Past issues
