Alibaba is about to test how much the word "open" is really worth. According to two people familiar with the plan, first reported by Reuters, the company intends to ask the biggest commercial users of its next Qwen model to hand over a share of the revenue they earn from it. The model itself would stay open-weight, meaning anyone can still download the trained parameters and run them on their own hardware. But the largest players, the ones turning Qwen into a paid service, would first have to negotiate a commercial agreement with Alibaba. It is a small change in the fine print with large implications for what "open" AI actually means.
This is not a one-off. Alibaba is copying a template set last month by Chinese startup Moonshot, whose Kimi K3 licence quietly requires anyone reselling the model as a service to strike a deal once their sales pass 20 million US dollars a year, with the revenue share reportedly running as high as 30 percent. Chinasoft International has already disclosed such an arrangement in a regulatory filing. What looked like a wave of free, near-frontier models pouring out of China is starting to resolve into something more familiar: a freemium business, free for the many, billed to the few who make real money.
The reason is arithmetic. Training a frontier-class model costs a fortune, and giving it away earns nothing directly. Moonshot reportedly leaned on 20,000 Nvidia chips from Alibaba's own cloud to build Kimi K3, and someone has to pay for that hardware. Meanwhile a brutal price war rages at home, with DeepSeek making a 75 percent discount permanent and squeezing everyone's ability to charge for plain access. Charging the heaviest commercial users is the one lever left that funds the next model without slamming the door on the developers who made these models popular in the first place.
It also exposes a distinction the industry has been happy to blur. Under the Open Source Initiative's definition, an open-source system should let anyone use, study, modify and share it for any purpose without asking permission. A revenue threshold that forces the most successful users to sign a contract is a long way from that. Alibaba releases its current Qwen3 weights under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence; the new terms would move it toward the more conditional model Moonshot pioneered. Open-weight, it turns out, is not the same as open-source, and the gap is exactly where the money sits.
What makes this more than a licensing footnote is who is watching. US firms including DigitalOcean already resell Chinese models, and revenue-sharing deals that send money back to Chinese labs are taking shape even as the White House accuses Moonshot of stealing technology from Anthropic, a claim Beijing rejects. Chinese developers have converged on a viable way to fund their assault on the frontier, and Western companies are helping pay for it. The download stays free. The question is whether "open" survives contact with the invoice.