ANO—THER. ● NEWS

Alibaba

Illustration for the Qwen local reverse engineering story
open sourcemodels

An offline 27B model broke a paid app's license check in 30 minutes

A writer at XDA gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job he assumed needed a frontier model: work out how a commercial application he had legitimately bought verifies its license. Running locally on a Lenovo ThinkStation PGX with an Nvidia GB10 chip and 128 GB of unified memory, with no cloud involved, the model did static analysis through ARM64 disassembly, recovered the embedded RSA public key, documented the authentication architecture, named three weak points and produced a working proof-of-concept bypass in roughly 30 minutes. He notes the scope: one application, one run, maximum reasoning effort.

Illustration for the Apple Intelligence in China story
productspolicy

Apple Intelligence cleared Chinese approval with Qwen under the hood

On July 15, 2026, Apple Intelligence was registered with the Cyberspace Administration of China, the approval Apple needed to switch on AI features for mainland iPhone users. Alibaba's Qwen model will power Apple Intelligence across iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS, handling text and image generation, with Baidu helping develop additional AI tools. No launch date yet; registration usually precedes rollout by a few months, lining up with Apple's fall software cycle.

Illustration for the China AI companion law story
policy

China's AI companion law forced Doubao to delete custom agents

China's 'Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services' took effect on July 15, 2026, requiring any AI that simulates human personality to ship anti-addiction systems, usage-time notifications, instant-exit mechanisms and real-time detection of emotional over-dependence. ByteDance's Doubao, one of China's biggest consumer AI apps, took its custom agents offline on July 15, citing product function adjustments, and Alibaba's Qwen did the same. After October 15, Doubao agent data can no longer be viewed or recovered in the app.

Illustration for the China AI companion law story
policy

China's AI companion law took effect and Doubao deleted its agents

China's Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services took effect on July 15, 2026, requiring any AI that simulates human personality to ship anti-addiction systems, mandatory usage-time notifications, instant-exit mechanisms and real-time detection of emotional over-dependence. ByteDance's Doubao, China's most popular chatbot, took its custom AI agents offline on July 15, citing product function adjustments, and Alibaba's Qwen did the same. After October 15, Doubao's related agent data can no longer be viewed or recovered in the app.

Illustration for the Qwen3.8-Max open weights announcement
modelsopen source

Alibaba will open-source Qwen3.8-Max, its biggest model yet

On August 3, 2026, Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion parameter model with 95 billion active per token, and said its weights will be open-sourced within a week. It is the first time a Qwen-Max-class model leaves the API, and it would be the largest open frontier-class release to date.