Alibaba's new open source Qwen3.5-Medium models offer Sonnet 4.5 performance on local computers

Alibaba's now famed Qwen AI development team has done it again: a little more than a day ago, they released the Qwen3.5 Medium Model series consisting of four new large language models (LLMs) with support for agentic tool calling, three of which are available for commercial usage by enterprises and indie developers under the standard open source Apache 2.0 license:

• Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

• Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

• Qwen3.5-27B

Developers can download them now on Hugging Face and ModelScope. A fourth model, Qwen3.5-Flash, appears to be proprietary and only available through the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API, but still offers a strong advantage in cost compared to other models in the West (see pricing comparison table below).

But the big twist with the open source models is that they offer comparably high performance on third-party benchmark tests to similarly-sized proprietary models from major U.S. startups like OpenAI or ...