Wan 2.6

Launched December 2025, Tongyi Wanxiang 2.6 (Wan 2.6) is Alibaba's video generation flagship aimed at professional film and short-drama production. It produces up to 15 seconds of 1080p video at 24fps — a 50% duration increase over Wan 2.5 — with native synchronized audio (dialogue, music, sound effects). The headline feature is Wan2.6-R2V, a reference-to-video mode that takes a character reference video (appearance plus voice) and generates new scenes preserving identity and vocal characteristics, which Alibaba described as China's first such capability.

The release also introduced Smart Multi-Shot mode, which automatically structures narrative videos from simple prompts without manual shot-by-shot direction, plus role-playing and storyboard controls for single- and multi-character scenes. It launched simultaneously on Alibaba Cloud's Bailian platform and the Wanxiang website.

Limitations: unlike the Wan 2.1 series, which Alibaba open-sourced under Apache 2.0, Wan 2.6 is primarily an API/platform offering — do not assume downloadable weights. Reference-to-video raises obvious deepfake and consent concerns, and pricing for heavy multi-shot production workloads should be modeled before committing.

Vendor-reported: 30% faster processing than Wan 2.5; longest single-shot duration among domestic Chinese models