Alibaba's Qwen model topped the "Alpha Arena" real-time AI investing competition with a 22.3% gain, beating five global large language models, organizers said on Tuesday.

The 17-day contest, launched on Oct. 18 by research firm Nof1, gave each participant US$10,000 to trade autonomously in live markets without human input. Qwen and fellow Chinese model DeepSeek were the only two to turn a profit, while all four U.S. models — including GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Grok 4 — ended in the red. GPT-5 recorded the steepest loss at more than 62%.