Alibaba Pushes for Revenue Sharing on Qwen

Reuters reported that Alibaba is considering requiring companies using the open-weight version of Qwen3.8-Max for large-scale commercial purposes to share a portion of their generated revenue.

• The revenue-sharing rate has not yet been finalized, and Alibaba plans to apply the new terms alongside the open-weight release.
• Until now, Alibaba charged for usage on its own cloud but generally did not impose additional fees for open-weight models deployed in customer data centers.
• If this policy is implemented, commercial deployments operating outside Alibaba Cloud will also be subject to monetization terms.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot is also requiring commercial contracts from companies that have exceeded $20 million in annual revenue by selling Kimi K3 as a service, with reports suggesting it can receive up to 30% of the revenue depending on the contract.

Alibaba introduced Qwen3.8-Max as its most powerful model to date, featuring a total of 2.4 trillion parameters and 95 billion active parameters. The open-weight release is scheduled for next week.