Alibaba Unveils Qwen 3: Open-Source AI Coding Model

Alibaba’s Qwen team has unveiled a groundbreaking artificial intelligence coding model known as Qwen 3 Coder. Released on Tuesday, this innovative model boasts several advanced capabilities, including agentic coding, browser use, and tool use. The most powerful variant, Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, is now available for local download and is said to perform comparably to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model.
Qwen 3 Coder Model Features
The Qwen 3 Coder is a mixture-of-expert (MoE) model that contains an impressive 480 billion parameters, with 35 billion of those active at any given time. It offers a native context length of 256,000 tokens, which can be expanded to one million tokens through extrapolation methods. This model is designed to facilitate agentic coding, browser use, and tool use, making it a versatile option for developers.
In a recent blog post, the Qwen team emphasized that the model is open-source and can be downloaded from Qwen’s listings on Hugging Face and GitHub. It is released under a permissive Apache 2.0 license, allowing for both academic and commercial applications. Alongside the model, the team has introduced an open-source command-line tool called Qwen Code, which enhances the agentic coding experience.
Performance and Benchmarking
According to Alibaba’s AI team, the Qwen 3 Coder has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among open-source models on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark. This benchmark measures the highest scores previously unattainable by other models. The Qwen team attributes this success to a scalable system built on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure, capable of running 20,000 independent environments simultaneously.
This achievement underscores the model’s potential to revolutionize coding practices and enhance productivity for developers. The Qwen team has expressed confidence in the model’s capabilities, suggesting that it could set new standards in the field of AI-driven coding.
Integration and Compatibility
To further enhance the functionality of the Qwen 3 Coder, the Qwen Code command-line tool has been developed. This tool, built from Gemini Code, features custom prompts and function-calling protocols that allow the AI model to write, edit, deploy, and execute code within an integrated development environment (IDE).
While Qwen Code is optimized for use with the Qwen 3 Coder, it can also be integrated with the OpenAI software development kit (SDK) for calling large language models (LLMs). Additionally, developers can utilize the Qwen coding model in conjunction with Claude Code, although they will need to request an API key from the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio platform to do so. This flexibility makes the Qwen 3 Coder a valuable asset for developers looking to leverage AI in their coding workflows.
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