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Alibaba lets developers download Qwen3.8-Max, with new paid licenses
Large companies using Qwen3.8-Max commercially, including model-as-a-service and AI work assistant businesses above US$50 million in revenue, must obtain a separate commercial licence, while internal use remains exempt.
Alibaba Group Holding has made the core files of its latest flagship AI model, Qwen3.8-Max, free to download, but the company is also introducing new rules for commercial use.
The licensing terms apply to users or their affiliates running a model-as-a-service or AI work assistant business with aggregate revenue above US$50 million over any consecutive 12-month period. Those users must obtain a separate licence from Qwen before using the model or its derivatives for commercial purposes, while internal use is exempt as long as the software, its outputs, or underlying model capabilities are not made available to third parties.
Alibaba’s move allows most developers to use, copy, modify, and distribute Qwen3.8-Max, which the company describes as having 2.4 trillion parameters, without paying for the model itself, though developers still bear their own compute costs.
For users who access the model through paid APIs, Alibaba lists pricing in China at 12 yuan, or US$1.80, per million input tokens and 36 yuan per million output tokens, with international rates at US$2 per million input tokens and US$6 per million output tokens. The outlet also notes that, based on these rates, Qwen3.8-Max’s input and output costs are about 40.0 percent and 24.0 percent, respectively, of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.