Ant Group

Ant Group is one of the largest fintech companies in the world, headquartered in Hangzhou, China. The company spun out of Alibaba in 2014 and operates Alipay, the dominant mobile payments platform across China and much of Southeast Asia, alongside a credit, wealth-management, and merchant-services portfolio. Ant's AI strategy sits in two layers: a large applied-AI organization that integrates models into financial workflows (fraud detection, credit scoring, customer support), and a frontier-research lab — InclusionAI — that ships open-weights foundation models alongside the applied work.

In early May 2026, InclusionAI published Ling-2.6 on Hugging Face, including a 1 trillion parameter flagship variant, under a permissive MIT license. The architecture is a hybrid of Multi-head Latent Attention and Linear Attention with a 262,144-token context window. Headline benchmark: 72.2 on SWE-bench Verified, among the strongest scores any open-weights model has posted on a coding evaluation. Inference requires tensor parallelism across 8 GPUs. A companion hosted-only sibling, Ring 2.6 at the same trillion-parameter scale, surfaced on OpenRouter at the same time. The release is significant beyond the benchmark numbers: Ant Group is a mainstream financial-services giant choosing to ship trillion-parameter weights under MIT — a different distribution posture from US frontier labs, where flagship weights stay closed and only research-grade or older-generation models go open. For developers and security-conscious enterprises that need to run frontier-scale models inside their own perimeter, Ant's open-weights stack is increasingly the only option at this scale.

InclusionAI's broader publication record includes earlier Ling models, the Ring hosted family, and an embodied-AI sub-organization called Robbyant. Model access is offered both via direct Hugging Face downloads (open weights) and through ZenMux and OpenRouter for hosted inference. Ant's overall AI investment is part of a Chinese pattern — Alibaba (Qwen), Baidu (ERNIE), DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Zhipu — where multiple major Chinese tech operators are simultaneously shipping at the trillion-parameter scale under permissive licenses, in contrast to the US closed-weights majority. AI Pro Playbook is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with Ant Group.