Until now the company has charged only for the models developers run on its own cloud, letting most of what it open-sources be used free inside data centres the customers themselves operate. In charging heavy users it would be following Moonshot, the Chinese startup whose Kimi K3 licence already makes the biggest resellers of that model negotiate commercial terms.
Alibaba intends to require heavy users of Qwen3.8-Max, the coming release of its open-source Qwen model, to hand back a slice of the revenue they earn from it, two people with knowledge of the company's thinking told Reuters. Both asked not to be identified because the plans are not public, and both said the size of the cut has not been settled while talks continue.
As of August 7, the two people said, the plan was to introduce the measure the following week. The cut would not come with a lock on the model: Qwen3.8-Max still arrives with both source and weights open, so the trained parameters needed to run or modify it can be downloaded, unlike the models of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which those firms keep locked down.
Alibaba would not be the first. Under the licence attached to Kimi K3, anyone who sells access to that model as a service and takes in more than $20 million a year has to negotiate commercial terms with Moonshot, and one of the two people said the licence calls for a cut of revenue reaching as high as 30%. Approached for comment, Moonshot gave no reply.
Chinasoft International, an IT services company based in China, disclosed in a filing to regulators that it has a revenue-sharing arrangement with Moonshot, without saying what the percentage is. DigitalOcean's chief executive, Paddy Srinivasan, acknowledged a commercial deal with Moonshot but would not describe it or give its terms. What companies pay open-weight model labs for, he said, is help that tunes their deployment and early access to the next revision of a model — a freemium approach proven in open source, in his description.
What is taking shape, then, is a flow of money from American firms back to the Chinese labs behind the models they earn from — and it is taking shape while the White House alleges that Moonshot took technology from Anthropic, an allegation officials in China have dismissed as baseless.
Cover image: “Alibaba group Headquarters” by Thomas LOMBARD , designed by HASSELL (architects) [ 1 ], Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, resized, re-encoded.
