Alibaba and Moonshot are giving AI away for free, here's how they plan to make money
Chinese AI companies are increasingly giving powerful AI models away for free, hoping to attract more users, developers and businesses while taking on their US
Chinese AI companies are increasingly giving powerful AI models away for free, hoping to attract more users, developers and businesses while taking on their US rivals. Sounds like a great deal, right? But there’s one catch. Building and sustaining these models needs money, a lot of it. And now Chinese AI companies are facing the same problem as their US counterparts: how do you turn all those users into actual revenue? Alibaba, one of China’s biggest AI companies and the maker of Qwen, is reportedly considering asking big businesses using its next Qwen model to share some of the money they make from it. Read Full Story According to Reuters, citing two people familiar with the company’s plans, the Qwen creator is now looking at a new way to make money from its open-source AI models. Alibaba may ask large commercial users to share a portion of the revenue generated from these models, though specific terms and rates are still under discussion.
Until now, Alibaba has largely allowed customers to download and run its models in their own data centres without paying the company. It does charge developers when they use its models through Alibaba Cloud. But as more businesses use Qwen to build products and services of their own, Alibaba is reportedly looking for ways to earn from that commercial success as well. Alibaba is not the first one who wants revenue share The report of Alibaba considering a revenue-sharing model comes as the company is expected to release Qwen3.8-Max next week. The model is open-source and open-weight, meaning developers can download its weights, essentially the settings that allow the AI to generate responses, and run or adapt it themselves. This gives developers more control over how they use the model than they get with leading models from US companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which are largely closed and accessed through their own services.
But keeping a model open-source does not mean a company has to make every use of it free. It can still charge businesses for commercial use, support or other services built around the model. Notably, the idea of asking for a share of revenue is not entirely new in China. Alibaba’s planned approach follows a similar strategy from AI startup Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi K3. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 licence mentions that companies that sell the model as a service and generate more than $20 million in annual sales must enter into a separate commercial agreement with the company. According to the report Alibaba is considering a similar condition for Qwen3.8-Max. China’s AI models are also competing on price Price is another big part of the competition between China and US. Chinese AI companies are offering models at much lower prices than some of their US rivals.
The BriefWire