Alibaba Cloud said revenue from model-as-a-service (MaaS) token usage grew 15-fold in the first five months of 2026. The company disclosed the figure at a May 20 launch event, saying monthly revenue from the segment has reached a nine-figure RMB sum. It tied the increase to one driver: artificial intelligence agents.
The company also released Qwen 3.7-Max, its latest flagship model, alongside a slate of other products. The launch came just one month after Qwen 3.6-Max, underscoring how quickly large models are being updated as agentic coding, the use of AI agents to write and execute code, becomes a central competitive front.
That pace is partly a response to OpenClaw’s popularity in February, which pushed model companies to improve coding performance for agent scenarios. Competition among large language models (LLMs) is increasingly centered on coding, and Alibaba needs a strong model in that field to maintain the competitiveness of its MaaS business.
Alibaba is not alone. That same day, Google held its developer conference in Silicon Valley, where the theme was similarly centered on cloud-based agentic AI. Its new chips, models, applications, and other products were organized around agents.
