Alibaba Group Holding has unveiled a “leading open-source deep research” artificial intelligence agent that it says matches the performance of OpenAI’s flagship Deep Research tool, while being more efficient, reports the South China Morning Post. The agent has been integrated into Alibaba’s maps app, Amap, and its AI-powered legal research tool, Tongyi FaRui, according to a blog post on Tuesday by Alibaba’s AI search development team, Tongyi Lab.
Users of Amap can leverage the deep research agent’s web retrieval capabilities to plan multi-day trips. Meanwhile, Tongyi FaRui has been updated with the agent’s research functions, enhancing its ability to retrieve case law with verified citations, according to Alibaba.
The agent is the latest addition to Alibaba’s rapidly expanding AI initiatives. In the past two weeks alone, the company has launched its first trillion-parameter base model, Qwen-3-Max-Preview, along with Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B—a smaller yet more powerful model, according to benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis.