Alibaba Group announced this Thursday, August 13, that it has made the main files of its new artificial intelligence model Qwen3.8-Max freely available, but with restrictions that require large companies to pay for a separate commercial license.
According to the company, the requirement applies to users or affiliates that operate a 'model-as-a-service' or 'AI work assistant' business whose aggregate revenue exceeds US$ 50 million in any consecutive 12-month period. In such cases, a separate Qwen license must be obtained before using the model or its derivatives for commercial purposes.
Internal use is exempt from the license, provided that the software, its results, or the model's underlying capabilities are not made available to third parties.
With the change, most developers can use, copy, modify, and distribute Qwen3.8-Max — which has 2.4 trillion parameters — without paying Alibaba, but they bear the computing costs.
API pricing
In addition to the free download, Alibaba offers access through paid APIs. In China, the API costs 12 yuan (US$ 1.80) per million input tokens and 36 yuan per million output tokens. In the international market, the prices are US$ 2 and US$ 6 per million tokens, respectively. At these prices, Qwen3.8-Max costs about 40% and 24% of Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 for input and output tokens, respectively.
