AI SDK - Alibaba Provider

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

Deploying to Vercel? With Vercel's AI Gateway you can access Alibaba (and hundreds of models from other providers) — no additional packages, API keys, or extra cost. Get started with AI Gateway.

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);

Preserved Thinking Example (Multi-Turn Reasoning)

For models that support preserved thinking, the AI SDK sends reasoning from previous assistant messages back as Alibaba reasoning_content by default (preserve_thinking), so the model can build on its earlier thought process:

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

const providerOptions = {
  alibaba: {
    enableThinking: true,
    thinkingBudget: 2048,
  },
};

const opening = {
  role: 'user' as const,
  content: 'Is Kafka or RocketMQ a better fit for transactional messages?',
};

const first = await generateText({
  model: alibaba('qwen3.7-max'),
  messages: [opening],
  providerOptions,
});

const second = await generateText({
  model: alibaba('qwen3.7-max'),
  messages: [
    opening,
    ...first.responseMessages, // append unchanged to keep the reasoning parts
    { role: 'user', content: 'Which tradeoff mattered most?' },
  ],
  providerOptions,
});

When continuing the conversation, append responseMessages unchanged so the reasoning parts survive to be serialized as reasoning_content. Set the preserveThinking provider option to false to opt out. Keep in mind:

• preserveThinking does not enable thinking by itself.
• It is enabled by default only for models that Alibaba documents as supporting preserved thinking; for other models the option is not sent unless you set it explicitly. See Alibaba's preserved-thinking documentation.
• Reasoning from the current tool-call round is always sent back with tool results, as Alibaba recommends.
• Preserved reasoning increases input token usage and billing.
• Historical reasoning remains separate from visible assistant text; it is never merged into content.

Embedding Model Example

import { alibaba, type AlibabaEmbeddingModelOptions } from '@ai-sdk/alibaba';
import { embed } from 'ai';

const { embedding, usage } = await embed({
  model: alibaba.embedding('text-embedding-v4'),
  value: 'sunny day at the beach',
  providerOptions: {
    alibaba: {
      textType: 'document',
      dimension: 1024,
      outputType: 'dense',
    } satisfies AlibabaEmbeddingModelOptions,
  },
});

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',
      inputSchema: 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.