Alibaba Group Holding’s artificial intelligence strategy is defined by a commitment to open-source models, the company said on Tuesday, following a year of soaring adoption for its suite of AI services.
The statement came as Alibaba’s stock in New York rose more than 10 per cent on Monday, following news that its flagship Qwen family of AI models surpassed 700 million downloads on the developer platform Hugging Face, making it the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI system.
“A defining feature of Alibaba’s AI approach in 2025 has been its commitment to openness,” the company said. “Rather than gatekeeping capabilities, Alibaba has leaned into open-source software. This has helped developers and companies build faster and at lower cost.”
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Open-source models from Alibaba and other Chinese AI companies had caught up or “even pulled ahead” of their US counterparts in capabilities and adoption, according to a Stanford University report published last month.
Alibaba hailed the importance of the open-source approach, which allowed “building with the community”. It cited the case of Nvidia’s Cosmos-Reason1-7B, a model platform for physical AI, which was post-trained based on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct for embodied reasoning and physical-world understanding.
The Hangzhou-based giant kicked off last year by announcing it would invest 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) in AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years. This commitment was expanded at September’s Apsara conference, in which CEO Eddie Wu Yongming laid out a road map to developing artificial superintelligence, sending the company’s stock to a four-year high.
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