Alibaba Unveils The Qwen Book
Credit: AI
According to Caixin Global and industry publications covering the launch, Alibaba Cloud unveiled the Qwen Book—a device positioned as the first personal computer powered by an AI agent—on September 23 at the Apsara 2026 conference in Hangzhou. The product’s official English name is Alibaba Cloud / Qwen Book.
Qwen Book series laptops will be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip and run on the Android-based Qwen Desktop OS, which is designed from the ground up to support interaction with AI agents. Essentially, these laptops will operate fully within Alibaba’s proprietary ecosystem, encompassing the operating system, AI models, applications, and cloud services. While remaining under full human control, the laptop actively utilizes AI services and agent-based solutions to accelerate routine tasks. For instance, creating presentations becomes significantly easier: users can draft slide content using a stylus that doubles as a microphone, capturing voice commands and integrating information—prepared by a cloud-based AI model—directly into the editable slides. The presentation content can be viewed simultaneously on another user’s smartphone (such as a colleague’s or manager’s), allowing them to remotely approve changes made to the presentation.
The timeline for the commercial launch remains in the early stages: recruitment for approximately 100 participants in the in-depth testing program (“Day One”) is underway until October 31, with the first wave of hands-on testing scheduled for December—aligning with Caixin’s reports of a public trial launch that same month. Thus, Qwen Book is a consumer PC-format solution (built on the Apsara platform) designed to advance Alibaba’s strategy of deploying AI agents on end-user devices; it is specifically a hardware platform and desktop OS, rather than the software stack for mobile AI agents discussed previously.
