On Tuesday, Alibaba’s Qwen team unveiled a new artificial intelligence coding model, named Qwen 3 Coder. This model introduces several advanced functionalities, including agentic coding, agentic browser use, and agentic tool use. Currently, only one variant has been released: the Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, which stands as the most advanced version within this model family. Alibaba’s AI researchers assert that this open-source model shows performance levels comparable to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model. The large language model (LLM) is now available for local download.
Qwen 3 Coder Model with Agentic Capabilities Released
In a blog post, the research team elaborated on the features of their new agentic coding tool. It can be accessed as an open-source model, with downloadable weights available on Qwen’s Hugging Face listing and GitHub listing. This model is licensed under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, permitting both academic and commercial applications. In addition to the model, an open-source command-line tool known as Qwen Code is also available for agentic coding purposes.
The Qwen 3 Coder is characterized as a mixture-of-expert (MoE) model, comprising 480 billion parameters. Of these, 35 billion parameters are active during operation, with a native context length of 256,000 tokens. The context window can be augmented to one million tokens utilizing extrapolation techniques. Researchers emphasized that the model enables agentic coding, agentic browser use, and agentic tool use.
According to the company, Qwen 3 Coder has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among open-source models on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark. SOTA here signifies a record high score that had not been previously reached by any other model. The Qwen team noted that this achievement stemmed from developing a scalable system built on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure, capable of running 20,000 independent environments concurrently.
To facilitate agentic coding, the researchers introduced the Qwen Code command-line tool. Derived from Gemini Code, it features custom prompts and function calling protocols, empowering the AI to write, edit, deploy, and execute code within an integrated development environment (IDE).
While Qwen Code is primarily designed for integration with the Qwen 3 Coder AI model, it can also be combined with the OpenAI software development kit (SDK) when utilizing various LLMs. Furthermore, the Qwen coding model is compatible with Claude Code, although developers will need to obtain an API key through the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio platform.
