Alibaba To Charge Big Companies For Using Its 'Free' Qwen AI Model

Alibaba is about to prove that "open source" and "free" are not the same word.

According to two people familiar with the company's plans, cited by Reuters, Alibaba intends to ask major commercial users of its next Qwen AI model to share a cut of the revenue they generate from it. The plan could roll out as early as next week, though the exact percentage is still being negotiated, according to TechNode.

The model in question is Qwen3.8-Max, Alibaba's largest and most capable release to date. It's a big piece of engineering: 2.4 trillion total parameters, roughly 95 billion active at a time, and a context window that can handle a million tokens at once, according to Ground News. It landed fifth on major AI leaderboards, putting it in the same conversation as top offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Alibaba Group shares jumped about 7% after the model's unveiling, according to Ground News. The company's cloud business in the Asia Pacific region grew 38% year-over-year to $6 billion last quarter. Its legacy e-commerce and retail operations, by contrast, grew just 6% amid weak consumer spending and heavy competition. The AI push is doing more heavy lifting for Alibaba's growth story than its original business right now.

How the "free" model actually works

Qwen3.8-Max is open-weight, meaning developers can download the underlying trained model and run it themselves on their own servers, without going through Alibaba's cloud platform. That's the pitch that's made Chinese AI labs a threat to the closed-source model favored by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

But Alibaba is following a script written last month by Moonshot, another Chinese AI firm. Moonshot's Kimi K3 model carries a licensing term buried in the fine print: any company that turns the model into a paid service and clears $20 million in annual sales has to negotiate a commercial agreement with Moonshot, according to Reuters. Moonshot has reportedly asked for as much as a 30% revenue share.

Alibaba plans something similar, according to Reuters' sources, though the specific rate hasn't been locked down because negotiations are still underway. This is a real shift for Alibaba specifically. Until now, the company has only charged for models run on its own Alibaba Cloud platform, letting customers use most of its open models in their own data centers for free, according to TechNode.

That's the classic Silicon Valley freemium model, just imported to Hangzhou: give away the tool to build a user base, then charge once someone's making serious money off it.

Chinasoft already signed on

This isn't hypothetical. Chinasoft International, a Chinese IT services provider, disclosed a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot last month in a regulatory filing, though it didn't reveal the percentage, according to Reuters. Deals like this are already happening, not just being drafted.

There's a political wrinkle in the picture. The White House has accused Moonshot of stealing technology from Anthropic, a claim Chinese officials have rejected as unfounded, according to Reuters. That dispute is unresolved and sits awkwardly alongside the fact that American companies are apparently negotiating revenue-sharing deals with the same firm the U.S. government has accused of IP theft. No formal investigation or charges tied to that allegation were detailed in the available reporting, so it remains an accusation, not an established fact.

Neither Alibaba nor Moonshot has confirmed exact terms publicly. Moonshot did not respond to Reuters' request for comment. Alibaba's own comment, if any, wasn't included in available reporting, leaving the percentage and scope of its plan unconfirmed until the company makes it official, expected as soon as next week.

What's actually at stake

For American developers weighing whether to build on Qwen instead of GPT or Claude, the calculus just got more complicated. Free-to-use only holds until you're profitable enough to notice. At that point, you owe someone in Hangzhou a cut, the same way you'd owe a cloud vendor or a licensing partner in the U.S.

Developers outside China will need to decide whether Qwen3.8-Max is affordable and reliable enough to build real products on, given this pricing structure is materializing after adoption decisions, not before. The exact revenue-share percentage, and how aggressively Alibaba enforces it against companies that don't voluntarily disclose their usage, remains unresolved and worth watching once the terms go public next week.