Alibaba to Take Revenue Cut from Next Qwen Model Users

Alibaba plans to require large commercial users of its next open-source AI model to share a portion of their revenue, two people familiar with the matter said, following a similar approach taken last month by Chinese rival Moonshot.

The model, Qwen3.8-Max, was released as an open-weight system, meaning developers can download and adapt the underlying architecture. But Alibaba intends to insert a licensing provision that triggers a commercial agreement once a user generates more than $20 million in annual revenue from offering the model as a service. Moonshot's Kimi K3 license, which set the template, demands a revenue share of up to 30 percent, one source said. Alibaba's rate remains under discussion.

The shift marks a departure for Alibaba, which has previously charged for Qwen models only when they run on its cloud platform while allowing free use in customers' own data centres. The new terms suggest Chinese AI labs are converging on a freemium model long familiar in Silicon Valley: offer access at low or zero upfront cost, then take a cut when a product built on that technology reaches meaningful scale.

Paddy Srinivasan, chief executive of cloud computing firm DigitalOcean, confirmed his company has a commercial agreement with Moonshot. He described the arrangement as a tried and tested open-source freemium playbook. "You pay for collaboration with these open-weight model labs to make sure that you're optimizing your deployment. You pay for getting early access for the next revision of the model," he said.

Chinese firms have shocked markets with open models nearly matching the capabilities of U.S. systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. The revenue-sharing push is their answer to monetizing that momentum. Moonshot's Kimi K3 costs roughly one-third of Anthropic's Fable model on a per-token basis, making the share of a smaller pie still attractive if adoption spreads widely.