Alibaba plans to take a share of revenue from large commercial users of its next open-weight Qwen model, according to two people familiar with the company's plans. The terms could be introduced as early as next week, and the percentage "remains unclear as the discussions are ongoing".
Where 30% comes from
The figure circulating belongs to someone else. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 licence requires up to a 30% revenue share, and obliges anyone offering the model as a service above $20m in annual sales to negotiate a commercial agreement. Alibaba is reported to be copying the structure, not the number.
What changes and what does not
Today, customers running most Alibaba open models in their own data centres pay nothing for the model; Alibaba charges only for hosting on Alibaba Cloud. Under the reported terms the weights stay downloadable and free below the commercial threshold. The target is resellers — companies whose business is serving someone else's model.
Not a retreat from open weights
This is a licence change, not a move to closed models. But it ends something specific: the period in which Chinese open-weight models could be commercialised at any scale for free, which is a large part of what drove their adoption against Western alternatives.
Two labs, one direction
China's two most-downloaded open-weight labs are converging on the same monetisation model within weeks of each other. Neither has closed a model. Both have found the same place to put a meter — at the point where someone else is charging for it.