Alibaba's latest AI model ran autonomously for 35 hours to optimize code for its own custom chip

Alibaba's Qwen team has released Qwen3.7-Max, a proprietary model designed for agent-based tasks. In a real-world test, the model ran a fully autonomous kernel optimization for 35 hours straight.

Like its predecessors Qwen3-Max and Qwen3.6-Plus, the new Max version is only available through the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API. Alibaba used to release its Qwen models as open source, but that's changed. The last open flagship was Qwen3.5-397B-A17B from February 2026.

Qwen3.7-Max supports OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible interfaces and plugs right into Claude Code, OpenClaw, or Qwen Code. The Qwen team says the model targets four use cases: working as a coding agent from front-end prototypes to complex multi-file software projects, automating office tasks with external tools, running autonomously for long stretches, and performing consistently across different agent frameworks.

A kernel experiment that ran for 35 hours

Qwen3.7-Max was tasked with optimizing a hardware-based attention kernel for the open-source inference software SGLang. The hardware was a cloud instance with T-Head-ZW-M890 accelerators, an AI chip platform from Alibaba's own semiconductor arm.