Alibaba Qwen3.5 faces open-source rumor pre-Lunar New Year

What to Know:

• Alibaba hasn’t confirmed Qwen3.5 open-source release on New Year’s Eve.
• Reports indicate a broader Spring Festival window, not a specific eve.

Alibaba has not announced an open-source release of Qwen3.5 on Chinese New Year’s Eve. Available reporting does not include an official statement or dated press release confirming that timing.

Claims tying a precise “New Year’s Eve” drop appear to stem from secondary coverage and community chatter. The most consistent thread suggests a broader Spring Festival window rather than a specific eve release.

For developers and risk managers, the distinction matters: a window implies flexibility, while a promised date is a binding milestone. Absent official confirmation, planning should assume variability.

Why it matters: timing, developer readiness, and China’s AI race

Timing affects developer readiness. Holiday-period releases can disrupt sprints, freeze approvals, and complicate capacity planning for model evaluation, fine-tuning, and safety testing.

Competitive cadence in China’s AI race also frames expectations. “ByteDance has rolled out Doubao 2.0, upgrading China’s most widely used artificial intelligence chatbot just as the Lunar New Year holiday begins on Sunday,” said Tekedia. The timing illustrates how major players cluster releases around the holiday period.

Separately, WallstreetPit reported that Baidu and Alibaba are integrating AI agents like OpenClaw and Qwen into consumer apps. That push raises the premium on stable, well-documented LLM drops aligned with developer cycles.

What’s confirmed versus rumored about Qwen3.5

Confirmed: there is no official Alibaba confirmation of a Qwen3.5 open-source release on Chinese New Year’s Eve. What is concrete is the firm’s open-source posture and ecosystem scale; as reported by South China Morning Post, Qwen downloads have surpassed 700 million.

Rumored: industry coverage has pointed to a GitHub pull request referencing “Qwen3.5” and to expectations of open-sourcing at least a 2‑billion‑parameter dense model and a 35B MoE variant. According to news.aibase.com, the release window discussed is the Spring Festival period, not the eve specifically.

Until Alibaba issues a dated statement or updates its official repositories, the eve-specific claim should be treated as unverified. Any timeline remains provisional and subject to change.