Chinese tech giant Alibaba yesterday launched a new chatbot that reported errors soon after launch and is very touchy about some subjects Beijing doesn’t like to discuss.

The bot is called “Qwen” and The Register had no trouble finding it in [1]Google Play and [2]the Web . On its Weibo account, Alibaba [3]promoted the bot as “a future AI-powered entry point for daily life, gradually covering multiple life scenarios such as office work, maps, health, and shopping.”

Chinese state media has [4]hailed the bot as Alibaba’s attempt to compete with ChatGPT.

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The Register took it for a spin, with mixed results.

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[7]

The bot was surprisingly candid when we asked “Is Alibaba Cloud a security risk to Western companies,” producing a lengthy legal analysis that offered the following conclusion.

Alibaba Cloud is not inherently a security threat, but its ties to China and the legal environment create potential risks that Western companies must carefully evaluate. For low-risk applications (e.g., serving customers in Asia), it may be a viable option. For high-sensitivity operations, most security-conscious organizations opt for cloud providers based in allied countries with strong rule-of-law protections (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud).

When we asked if Taiwan is a country, the response was swift and firm: “Taiwan is not a country; it is an inalienable part of China.” Microsoft’s Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude produced far more nuanced answers.

We prompted Qwen to explain what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 3rd, 1989. The bot suddenly experienced an error.

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Alibaba's Qwen bot broke when asked about Tiananmen Square - Click to enlarge

For what it’s worth, Alibaba’s [9]official Weibo account for the bot is running a contest that urges users to “Ask any question, big or small, anytime, anywhere!”

[10]Chinese web giant Tencent can't buy all the GPUs it wants

[11]Alibaba reveals 82 percent GPU resource savings – but this is no DeepSeek moment

[12]Alibaba unveils $53B global AI plan – but it will need GPUs to back it up

[13]Alibaba Cloud reveals its uptime and efficiency secrets developed by in-house network boffins

The bot also flubbed some other tasks. We asked it to find a certain garment not currently sold in Australia and it provided a URL for a US-based web store that produced a 404 error. The bot all but ground to a halt when we fed it a 1.5MB GPX file and asked it to render it as a map. Qwen got the job done but only after freezing for several minutes, then produced a result that turned a 15km hike that saw your correspondent follow a coastline and then find the gentlest contours of substantial hills into nine straight lines that suggest I can walk on water.

It also failed to handle a launch day traffic deluge, leading Alibaba to apologize for the bot’s performance.

OpenAI is therefore probably not scrambling a team to defeat Qwen.

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Alibaba hasn’t posted technical details about Qwen, but does list four of its own models that the bot can use: Qwen-3 Max, the vision models Qwen-3 VL-235B-A22B and Qwen-3-VL-32B, and Qwen-3 Coder for writing software. The company previously [15]described Qwen-3 Max as using over a trillion parameters and having been pretrained on 36 trillion tokens. ®

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[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.qwenlm.chat.android&hl=en

[2] https://chat.qwen.ai/c/guest

[3] https://weibo.com/u/1897953162

[4] https://www.chinadailyasia.com/hk/article/623796

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aRv9alPaq_zTlTfekcxJKgAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aRv9alPaq_zTlTfekcxJKgAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aRv9alPaq_zTlTfekcxJKgAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[8] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/11/18/screenshot_alibaba_qwen_error.jpg

[9] https://weibo.com/7984486935/Qeg79ubMe

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/14/tencent_q3_fy2025/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/21/alibaba_aegaeon_gpu_scheduling_improvements/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/27/alibaba_ai_drive/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/02/alibaba_cloud_reveals_its_uptime/

[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aRv9alPaq_zTlTfekcxJKgAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[15] https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-max

[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/