Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-08

Free to download, not free to resell: Alibaba wants a cut of what companies earn from Qwen

Alibaba plans to ask large commercial users of its next open-weight Qwen model for a share of the revenue they make from it, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the plans. The rate is still being negotiated, and the company intends to introduce the terms alongside the open-weight release of Qwen3.8-Max — its 2.4-trillion-parameter flagship — expected in the coming week. Until now Alibaba charged for models served from its own cloud but let customers run its open models in their own data centers for free, mostly under Apache 2.0. The approach mirrors Moonshot's licence for Kimi K3, which requires a separate commercial agreement above $20 million in revenue over any 12 months and can demand up to a 30% share. Alibaba has not publicly confirmed any terms.

Why it mattersChinese open-weight models became the cheap default this year, and a lot of companies rebuilt their products on the assumption that downloading the weights costs nothing. If the two biggest open-weight labs both start charging the businesses that resell them, 'open' quietly shifts to meaning free to run, not free to profit from. Individual developers and researchers are not the target — but anyone building a paid service on Chinese weights now has a bill to plan for.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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Free to download, not free to resell: Alibaba wants a cut of what companies earn from Qwen

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