Qwen's capybara mascot: traced to Oct 11, 2024, and the prompts still say bear
Contents
Open a Qwen model card on Hugging Face and you sometimes get a squat animal in a white T-shirt that looks like nothing but a bear.
It’s on the blog banners too.
I thought it was an odd character, looked it up, and it turned out to be Qwen’s official mascot, a capybara.
Figuring the one in the big hero image on Hugging Face had to be the same thing, I opened the Qwen-Image-Edit model card, and there it was, lined up in 16 variations right in the middle.
So how long has this thing been around?
I went through X posts, the official blog, Hugging Face model cards and GitHub commits in date order and built a timeline.
What I checked
| Source | What I did |
|---|---|
| X | Pulled @Alibaba_Qwen posts through the embed API (cdn.syndication.twimg.com) and Thread Reader, and checked post times and attached images |
| Official blog | Extracted image URLs from the HTML of the 31 posts still on the old site qwenlm.github.io/blog and opened every banner image |
| Hugging Face | Listed the repos under the Qwen org (464 as of August 27, 2026) via the API, collected the image URLs at the top of each README, and opened the 38 that were left after removing duplicates |
| GitHub | Cross-checked post dates against commit times in the blog repo QwenLM/qwenlm.github.io |
I pulled every image down with curl and looked at them one by one.
The newer blog (qwen.ai) renders in JavaScript so the image URLs weren’t reachable, so for posts from September 2025 onward I worked from the Hugging Face model cards instead.
I also had Codex run the same investigation in a separate session and compared the results.
Codex hadn’t managed to fetch the images and judged Qwen2.5-VL (January 2025) and Qwen2.5-Omni (March 2025) as “no capybara.”
In exchange it found two things I had missed: a line in the November 2024 Qwen2.5-Coder announcement, and the pet feature in Qwen Code Desktop in 2026.
October 11, 2024: a nine-post thread on X
The oldest one I could confirm is a post from the official @Alibaba_Qwen account at 19:50 JST on October 11, 2024.
🌟 Meet our mascot, a relaxed capybara. Known for its calmness and adaptability, the capybara symbolizes how Qwen is always ready to help you easily tackle the challenges of the tech world. We hope you like it!
— Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen) October 11, 2024
The attached image has the Qwen logo on purple on the left half, and the capybara in six panels on the right: holding a mug, aiming a camera, listening to music on headphones, slurping noodles, sleeping under a duvet, and facing a monitor with a “coder” headband on.
Every panel has the white T-shirt with the Qwen logo, line eyes and small ears, the same art style as today.
That post is a nine-post thread, and from the second post on it’s eight pairs of one short line and one drawing.
| Post text | Drawing |
|---|---|
| Qwen is pre-training | Reading a book with the Qwen logo next to a stack of books |
| Qwen is post-training | Taking a break with a teacup |
| Qwen Math | Holding a pointer at a blackboard with 1+1=2, 2+2=4 |
| Qwen Coder | Facing a monitor in the “coder” headband |
| Qwen VL | Aiming a camera |
| Qwen Audio | Surrounded by musical notes in light blue headphones |
| Qwen aspires to explore the universe | Holding a glowing Qwen logo under a starry sky |
| Qwen is cultivating 🥝 | Watering a kiwi tree with a watering can |
Nine hours after the announcement, at 04:49 JST on October 12, a FLUX LoRA trained on this art style, cfahlgren1/flux-qwen-capybara, was already up on Hugging Face (repo creation time confirmed via the API).
The trigger word is QWENCAPY.
On the official blog before this, from Qwen1.5 in February 2024 through Qwen2.5 on September 19 of the same year, the banners were mostly logos, parameter tables and benchmark charts, with no capybara.
The image attached to the Qwen2.5 announcement post on X (01:57 JST, September 19, 2024) was also just model names arranged inside a blue “Q.”
From the X announcement to the first blog appearance
Even after the announcement, no capybara showed up in the blog images for the Qwen2.5-Coder series on November 12, 2024, Qwen2.5-Turbo on November 15, QwQ-32B-Preview on November 28, or QVQ-72B-Preview on December 25.
All of them were radar charts and bar graphs, and for three and a half months after the X announcement no drawing was published.
The X thread announcing Qwen2.5-Coder-32B at 03:24 JST on November 12 does contain the line “Today, the Qwen capybara codes together with Ollama!”
The attached image was a radar chart.
It first appeared on the blog in the Qwen2.5-VL post dated January 26, 2025.
The banner image is named Qwen2.5-vl-Capybara.png to begin with.
It’s wearing a red Chinese-style jacket, and the small snake at its feet is the 2025 zodiac animal.
The post is dated January 26, but the commit that added it to the blog repo is from 04:00 JST on January 28 (4ffb13c).
Image quoted from the Qwen2.5-VL post on the Qwen blog.
Two days later, on January 28, it also turned up on the banner of the Qwen2.5-Max post (the post’s datePublished is 23:00 China time on the 28th, which is 00:00 JST on the 29th).
The hat belongs to Caishen, the Chinese god of wealth, and the gold lump underneath is old Chinese money.
Image quoted from the Qwen2.5-Max post on the Qwen blog.
Both were used as Lunar New Year decoration on the banners, and neither showed up in the model diagrams.
March 2025: into the diagrams
In the capability diagram for Qwen2.5-Omni (March 27, 2025), the capybara holds a phone and asks questions in all four scenes: video, text, image and audio.
Qwen3 (April 29) went back to the banner.
Image quoted from the Qwen3 post on the Qwen blog.
The Qwen-VLo banner (June 26) has it riding a yellow bicycle pulling balloons.
Within that same 2025, though, it was absent from the model cards for the July Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 line and Qwen3-Coder.
Qwen3-Coder’s lead image is a terminal-style benchmark table, and the 2507 line is bar graphs only.
August 2025: material for Qwen-Image-Edit
The Qwen-Image-Edit model card (released August 19, 2025) uses this capybara for the IP (intellectual property, such as characters) editing demo in its lead image.
Before the release, at 00:44 JST on August 14 (August 13 local), the official account posted a teaser saying you could make unlimited Qwen Capybara stickers.
The README body says “let’s take Qwen’s mascot—Capybara—as an example,” which, within what I checked, is the first place a model card or blog post states outright that the mascot is a capybara.
The same section also mentions making a 16-type MBTI emoji pack in Qwen Chat.
Image quoted from the Qwen/Qwen-Image-Edit model card on Hugging Face.
The slide carries eight editing prompts, and every one of them is written with “the bear."
"This bear is wearing a tuxedo, a magician’s hat, and holding a magic wand,” “Add a straw hat on the bear’s head.”
Capybaras are in the order Rodentia, bears in Carnivora.
From September 2025: bigger ears and hats
Qwen3-ASR (posted to X at 00:20 JST on September 9, 2025) came with the line “Big-Eared Capybara!” and a version drawn with enlarged ears.
Big-Eared Capybara! Qwen3-ASR
— Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen) September 8, 2025
The diagrams for Qwen3-Omni (September 2025) and the January 2026 model cards for Qwen3-TTS and Qwen3-ASR are full of capybaras in graduation caps, DJ headphones and hard hats.
In the architecture diagram for Qwen3-VL (September 2025), one of the input examples is a photorealistic capybara wearing goggles.
The overview diagram on the model card for Qwen-Scope (April 27, 2026), a sparse autoencoder that pulls the internal features of Qwen3 models apart into a small number of components, also draws it in four places alongside a hologram capybara.
Going the other way, the model cards for Qwen3.5 (February 2026) and Qwen3.6 (April) open with a text-only logo.
The Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model card from August 24 is architecture diagrams only, and the Hugging Face org icon is still the blue geometric logo.
Qwen Code, the coding agent, picked up a pet feature in its desktop build where this capybara wanders around the screen.
PR #3778 (merged June 11, 2026), which added the desktop package, includes assets/pets/qwen-spritesheet.webp and QwenPet.tsx, and Issue #4807 (June 5) calls the feature “the floating capybara.”
The desktop build itself was formally released in the weekly update on August 6.
Opening the sprite sheet in that PR (frames laid out in a single 1536×1872 image) shows 57 frames of face-only expression variants.
Blinking, a closed-eye smile, X-shaped eyes, a round open mouth. No body, no T-shirt.
In Chinese-language coverage, Tencent News wrote on May 19, 2026 about the teaser poster for the Alibaba Cloud summit: “从海报中出现的 Qwen 官方吉祥物水豚（卡皮巴拉）来看” (judging from the Qwen official mascot capybara that appears in the poster).
Timeline
| Date (JST) | Where | Capybara |
|---|---|---|
| September 19, 2024 | Qwen2.5 blog and X | None. Model table and performance charts |
| October 11, 2024, 19:50 | X @Alibaba_Qwen | Announced. Nine-post thread with one intro image and eight role drawings |
| October 12, 2024, 04:49 | Hugging Face cfahlgren1/flux-qwen-capybara | Community FLUX LoRA |
| November 12, 2024, 03:24 | X Qwen2.5-Coder announcement | The line “the Qwen capybara” in the body. Image is a chart |
| November 12 – December 25, 2024 | Qwen2.5-Coder, Qwen2.5-Turbo, QwQ-32B-Preview, QVQ-72B-Preview blog posts | None. Charts only |
| Dated January 26, 2025 (commit on the 28th) | Qwen2.5-VL blog | Banner. Red Chinese-style jacket and lantern |
| January 29, 2025, 00:00 | Qwen2.5-Max blog | Banner. Caishen hat and gold lump |
| March 27, 2025 | Qwen2.5-Omni blog | Four spots in the diagram |
| April 29, 2025 | Qwen3 blog | Banner. OK sign |
| June 26, 2025 | Qwen-VLo blog | Banner. Bicycle and balloons |
| July 2025 | Qwen3-2507 line, Qwen3-Coder model cards | None. Bar graphs and terminal image |
| August 14, 2025, 00:44 | X Qwen-Image-Edit teaser | Sticker samples |
| August 19, 2025 | Qwen-Image-Edit model card | Eight IP edits and 16 MBTI types. Body text states “mascot” |
| September 9, 2025, 00:20 | X Qwen3-ASR | Big-eared version |
| September 2025 | Qwen3-Omni, Qwen3-VL model cards | Many in diagrams. VL is photorealistic |
| January 2026 | Qwen3-TTS, Qwen3-ASR model cards | Many in diagrams |
| February and April 2026 | Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6 model cards | None. Logo only |
| April 27, 2026 | Qwen-Scope model card | Four spots in the overview diagram |
| May 19, 2026 | Alibaba Cloud summit teaser poster (Tencent News) | Present |
| June 11, 2026 | Qwen Code Desktop PR #3778 | Desktop pet feature. 57 face-only expression frames |
| August 24, 2026 | Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model card | None. Architecture diagrams only |
What it’s called
The official posts and model cards only call it “our mascot, a relaxed capybara” and “Qwen’s mascot—Capybara,” and no proper name showed up in the official posts and model cards I checked.
In Chinese it’s 卡皮巴拉 or 水豚.
March 2026: Anthropic had a Capybara codename too
On March 26, 2026, Fortune reported that a CMS misconfiguration at Anthropic had left drafts about an unreleased model readable from outside.
That model’s internal codename was “Capybara,” and on March 28 ifeng ran a piece headlined “千问痛失吉祥物？” (Qwen loses its mascot?).
That piece says former tech lead Junyang Lin (林俊旸), who had announced his departure on March 4 (Simon Willison’s post), commented “capybara? seriously?”