Alibaba targets Slack, WeChat, and Teams expansion in agentic AI platform launch

China’s tech giant Alibaba has launched Wukong, a new AI platform for business users that lets companies control multiple AI agents through one interface and comes with enterprise-grade security infrastructure.

According to Alibaba, the new platform is still in an invitation-only testing phase. Alibaba said the agents can take on jobs such as document editing, approvals, meeting transcription, and research.

That is a different setup from a regular chatbot, which usually waits for prompts and replies with text.

These agents are built to act on their own, which means they may need wider access to company data and internal systems, which you can understand raises privacy and security questions for businesses thinking about using them.

Alibaba connects Wukong to office apps and folds it into Taobao and Alipay

The name Alibaba chose (Wukong) comes from the Monkey King in the Chinese classic Journey to the West. Alibaba made the product available as a standalone desktop application and also through DingTalk, its workplace communications platform.

DingTalk already has more than 20 million corporate users, giving Alibaba a large built-in base for the product from day one.

The company also said it plans to connect Wukong to Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Tencent’s WeChat, opening the door to broader use on mobile devices.

Alibaba also plans to add Wukong across more parts of its wider ecosystem. The company said the platform will be integrated over time into services including Taobao and Alipay. That means the product is not being kept inside one office app.

Alibaba is trying to spread it across workplace software, shopping tools, and payment services. The launch came as Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares closed 0.45% higher Tuesday at 134.6 Hong Kong dollars, or $17.17.

Alibaba’s global rivals flood the market with OpenClaw products

The launch of Wukong also came during internal changes around Alibaba’s AI teams. On March 4, Lin Junyang, a key technical lead behind Qwen, posted a short message on X that read, “bye my beloved qwen.”

A day later, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu confirmed Lin’s departure in an internal memo, saying the company had accepted “Lin Junyang’s resignation and we sincerely thank him for his contributions during his time with us.”

Reuters claims that Lin’s exit was the third senior departure this year from the Qwen team, after Yu Bowen, who led post-training, and Hui Binyuan, who led coding.

At the same time, Alibaba has reportedly created Alibaba Token Hub, a new unit directly overseen by Eddie as the company speeds up its broader AI strategy.

The group is expected to focus on creating, distributing, and applying tokens, which are the basic computing units used by AI models. It will also combine several internal teams.

The goal is to cover the full AI stack, from foundation model work to enterprise-level applications.

The launch also landed in the middle of a wider OpenClaw rush across China’s tech sector. Within weeks of OpenClaw gaining attention from developers and hobbyists, major Chinese internet companies began releasing their own versions and integrations.

Tencent last week launched QClaw, which connects OpenClaw to WeChat. The company said users can send a message to QClaw through WeChat, and the agent will carry out the task immediately. ByteDance’s cloud unit, Volcano Engine, rolled out ArkClaw, a browser-based version.

Alibaba also released JVS Claw, a mobile app designed to make OpenClaw easier to install and deploy.

The race spread beyond the biggest platforms.

Xiaomi launched a closed beta test of MiClaw, an AI agent that lets users control Xiaomi smartphones and smart home devices with single-sentence commands.

Startups moved too. Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax released large language models or frameworks built on top of OpenClaw.

Last Tuesday, shares of Zhipu AI rose 13%, and MiniMax jumped 22% after their OpenClaw announcements.

Outside China, Nvidia on Monday said it had built NemoClaw, an enterprise platform based on OpenClaw.

Speaking at Nvidia’s 2026 GTC conference in San Jose, CEO Jensen Huang said, “It has a network guardrail, it has a privacy router, and as a result, we could protect and keep the claws from executing inside our company, and do it safely.”

Jensen added, “Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy, an agentic system strategy. This is the new computer.”

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