Alibaba Group has released its first suite of artificial intelligence models designed for robots, the company said on Tuesday, as it pushes into the growing field of physical AI.

The Qwen Robot Suite, built by the company's Tongyi Lab, has entered pilot testing with selected Alibaba Cloud customers, says Alibaba in an official announcement. The new suite consists of three models: Qwen-RobotNav for navigating physical spaces, Qwen-RobotWorld for predicting how scenes might evolve, and Qwen-RobotManip for carrying out physical tasks. The latter recently achieved the top score on the generalist track of the RoboChallenge real-robot benchmark, as per the company.

The launch moves Alibaba beyond language and multimodal software into direct competition with US firms such as Google DeepMind and Nvidia, as well as a wave of Chinese hardware and software companies racing to build robot intelligence, including Tencent, Unitree, and AgiBot. Sector interest is also growing in public markets, with robotics firm Unitree having filed for an initial public offering on the Shanghai Star Market.