Alibaba plans to charge big users of its next open-source AI model

Like last month's blockbuster model release from Chinese AI startup Moonshot, ​Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max model is an open-source, open-weight model, meaning that the underlying learned settings that allow developers to run or adapt the system are available for download. By contrast, U.S. developers OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet's Google have closed-source models.