Alibaba Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct: The New Open-Source Champion for Agentic Coding
Introduction
On 23 July 2025, Alibaba quietly released Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct, the largest open-source coding model to date. Built for agentic workflows—multi-turn code generation, tool use, and repository-level reasoning—it immediately claimed the #1 spot on public SWE-bench Verified and offers an Apache 2.0 license. Below we unpack what makes the model special, how it compares to proprietary giants, and how developers can start using it today.
Architecture at a Glance
• 480 B total parameters, 35 B active: A Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design activates only ~7% of weights per token, cutting inference cost without sacrificing capability.
• 256 K native context, extendable to 1 M tokens: YaRN extrapolation lets the model ingest entire repositories or multi-file diffs in a single pass.
• Training corpus: 7.5 T tokens—70 % code, 30 % mixed technical text—followed by reinforcement learning on real-world programming tasks.
Benchmark Results (Key Metrics)
| Benchmark | Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct | Claude Sonnet 4 | GPT-4-Turbo | Qwen2.5-Coder-32B |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | SOTA open ≈ Sonnet | ≈ Qwen3-Coder | lower | mid-tier |
| LiveCodeBench (internal) | 51.8 % | 52.1 %* | 49.0 %* | 32.9 % |
| Agentic Browser-Use Suite | #1 open | strong | strong | moderate |
*Public leaderboard figures.
Developer-Friendly Features
• Open weights under Apache 2.0: Full transparency, no vendor lock-in.
• Command-line tooling: qwen-code CLI replicates the UX of cline or claude-code; export QWEN_API_KEY and start coding.
• Native tool-calling protocol: Out-of-the-box support for shell, browser, and REST-API interactions, letting the model act as a true coding agent.
• Ecosystem hooks: Works with Cline, Claude Dev, and VS Code extensions via standard OpenAI-compatible APIs.
Deployment & Hardware Needs
• Hardware reality: at BF16 the model needs ~900 GB of GPU memory; most users will run it via cloud endpoints (Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, Hyperbolic, OpenRouter) or wait for smaller MoE variants that Alibaba has already teased.
• Cost saver: FP8 quantization halves VRAM; community INT4/LoRA checkpoints expected soon.
• Cloud endpoints: Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, Hyperbolic, and OpenRouter already host the model at <$0.002 per 1 K tokens (input).
Roadmap & Smaller Variants
Alibaba has confirmed Qwen3-Coder-70B-A9B and Qwen3-Coder-32B distilled checkpoints arriving within weeks, aimed at single-GPU local inference.
Conclusion
If you need the strongest open-source model for complex, agentic software engineering tasks, Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct is now the benchmark leader. While its full 480 B form demands serious hardware, upcoming quantized and distilled releases will put cutting-edge coding assistance within reach of every developer.