Alibaba mandates Qwen Work for all Taobao and Tmall merchants by end of 2027

Alibaba is making AI agents mandatory infrastructure for its marketplaces. Every merchant on Taobao and Tmall must move core operations onto Qwen Work, its agent platform built on the Qwen model family, by the end of 2027. That covers inventory, advertising, customer service and pricing. Alibaba also launched Accio, an agentic platform for small businesses that lack in-house programming skills, which automates store operations end to end.

The mandate converts millions of merchants into captive users of Alibaba's agent stack. For Alibaba, that means data, recurring revenue and a massive real-world training ground for commerce agents. Qwen is already the base for roughly half of fine-tuned enterprise models on Hugging Face across East Asia, and the company says it is training Qwen 4.

Critics, including coverage in Tech Times, point to China's intelligence laws: business data routed through Qwen Work could be accessible to the state. Merchants have little choice if they want to stay on Alibaba's platforms. That concern echoes the reasoning behind this week's US federal ban on DeepSeek.

Alibaba's Damo Academy separately reported 6 billion cumulative XuanTie RISC-V chip shipments, part of its push for hardware self-reliance. Watch for merchant pushback, regulatory responses outside China for cross-border sellers, and whether Amazon or Shopify move from optional AI tools toward stronger defaults.