AI SDK - Alibaba Provider

The Alibaba provider for the AI SDK contains language model support for Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, including the Qwen model series with advanced reasoning capabilities.

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Setup

The Alibaba provider is available in the @ai-sdk/alibaba module. You can install it with

npm i @ai-sdk/alibaba

Skill for Coding Agents

If you use coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor, we highly recommend adding the AI SDK skill to your repository:

npx skills add vercel/ai

Provider Instance

You can import the default provider instance alibaba from @ai-sdk/alibaba:

import { alibaba } from '@ai-sdk/alibaba';

Language Model Example

import { alibaba } from '@ai-sdk/alibaba';
import { generateText } from 'ai';

const { text } = await generateText({
  model: alibaba('qwen-plus'),
  prompt: 'Write a vegetarian lasagna recipe for 4 people.',
});

Thinking Mode Example (Qwen Reasoning Models)

Alibaba's Qwen models support thinking/reasoning mode for complex problem-solving:

import { alibaba } from '@ai-sdk/alibaba';
import { generateText } from 'ai';

const { text, reasoningText } = await generateText({
  model: alibaba('qwen3-max'),
  providerOptions: {
    alibaba: {
      enableThinking: true,
      thinkingBudget: 2048,
    },
  },
  prompt: 'How many "r"s are in the word "strawberry"?',
});

console.log('Reasoning:', reasoningText);
console.log('Answer:', text);

Tool Calling Example

import { alibaba } from '@ai-sdk/alibaba';
import { generateText, tool } from 'ai';
import { z } from 'zod';

const { text } = await generateText({
  model: alibaba('qwen-plus'),
  tools: {
    weather: tool({
      description: 'Get the weather in a location',
      parameters: z.object({
        location: z.string().describe('The location to get the weather for'),
      }),
      execute: async ({ location }) => ({
        location,
        temperature: 72 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 21) - 10,
      }),
    }),
  },
  prompt: 'What is the weather in San Francisco?',
});

Explicit Caching Example

Alibaba supports both implicit and explicit prompt caching to reduce costs for repeated prompts.

Implicit caching works automatically - the provider caches appropriate content without any configuration. For more control, you can use explicit caching by marking specific messages with cacheControl:

import { alibaba } from '@ai-sdk/alibaba';
import { generateText } from 'ai';

const longDocument = '... large document content ...';

const { text, usage } = await generateText({
  model: alibaba('qwen-plus'),
  messages: [
    {
      role: 'user',
      content: [
        {
          type: 'text',
          text: 'Context: Please analyze this document.',
        },
        {
          type: 'text',
          text: longDocument,
          providerOptions: {
            alibaba: {
              cacheControl: { type: 'ephemeral' },
            },
          },
        },
      ],
    },
  ],
});

Note: The minimum content length for a cache block is 1,024 tokens.

Documentation

Please check out the Alibaba provider documentation for more information.