Alibaba Reportedly Plans Revenue Sharing Fees for Large Commercial Qwen Users

August 7, IT Home reports that, according to Reuters, two people familiar with the matter said Alibaba plans to charge large commercial users of its next-generation open-source Qwen model by requiring them to share a percentage of their revenue. Similar to Moonshot AI’s previously released Kimi K3 model, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max is an open-source, open-weight model. Developers can download its underlying training parameters and run or fine-tune the model themselves. Open source is generally assumed to mean free, but the licensing terms for Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 include a special provision: Any entity that sells the model as a service and generates more than US$20 million in annual revenue (IT Home note: approximately RMB 135 million at current exchange rates) must enter into a commercial agreement with Moonshot AI. One of the sources said Moonshot AI may require a revenue share of up to 30%. The two sources said Alibaba plans to introduce a similar arrangement for its open-source model next week. However, because negotiations are still underway, the exact revenue-sharing percentage remains unclear. Cloud computing company DigitalOcean is one of several U.S. companies offering Kimi K3 and other Chinese AI models. CEO Paddy Srinivasan confirmed that the company had signed a commercial agreement with Moonshot AI but declined to disclose details. He described it as “a market-tested open-source ‘freemium’ model.” At present, Alibaba charges developers to host and use its models on its own cloud computing platform, but customers generally pay no fees when running most of its open-source models in their own data centers. Related reading: “Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max Model Officially Launches With 2.4 Trillion Parameters”