Alibaba plans to charge the largest commercial users of its next open-source Qwen model through revenue-sharing agreements, according to people familiar with the matter, in a subtle but significant shift from its strategy of giving models away to spread adoption. Reuters reported the plan exclusively on August 7.
The model itself would remain open-weight, so anyone could still download and run it freely. But companies building serious commercial products on top of it would first need to negotiate a commercial agreement. Alibaba has generally let businesses run its open models on their own infrastructure without paying, using openness to win over developers worldwide.
The template comes from a rival. Moonshot's Kimi K3 asks partners to share revenue once they cross a threshold — up to 30% for partners with more than $20 million in annual sales — effectively taxing the biggest beneficiaries while staying free for everyone else. Alibaba's own percentages are reportedly not yet fixed as it prepares the next release.
Why now? Qwen has real reach: Alibaba claims it is the world's number-two open-weight model and recently unveiled Qwen3.8-Max as its most capable. But open models are expensive to train and generate no direct revenue. A brutal price war in China — DeepSeek has made a 75% discount permanent — squeezes what labs can charge, while compute bills run into the billions; Moonshot reportedly trained Kimi K3 on 20,000 Nvidia chips rented from Alibaba's own cloud.
The move also reframes what "open" means: if the biggest users must sign contracts, the label describes the license more than the price. There is a geopolitical edge, too — Chinese labs have leaned on openness to spread their models globally while US leaders kept their best systems closed, and charging heavy users risks blunting that advantage. For smaller teams, nothing changes: free access remains. The bigger test is whether openness can fund itself — and whether Alibaba can turn reach into revenue without losing the developers who made Qwen popular in the first place.
