Alibaba Pushes Qwen Toward Paid APIs After Open-Source Surge

Alibaba spent two years handing Qwen out for free and made it one of the most widely adopted model families in the world. Now, according to The New York Times, the company has to answer the harder question of how to actually charge for it, and the early signs are that the pivot is not as clean as the OpenAI comparison makes it sound.

The scale of what Qwen has become is real. By the end of 2025, Qwen had climbed from roughly 1.2% of global self-hosted AI usage to around 30%, surpassing Meta's Llama in self-hosted deployments. That is a genuine platform position. The awkward part is that a self-hosted user, by definition, already has the weights and is not paying anyone for inference.

Alibaba's answer, as reported, is to move the flagship generations closed. Qwen3.6-Max and Qwen3.7-Plus have shifted to a closed, API-only model with usage fees attached, and the company has committed a ¥3 billion promotional budget tied to the 2026 Lunar New Year, with cloud infrastructure buildout running through 2027. The playbook, in the reporting's own words, is borrowed directly from OpenAI and Anthropic: build an audience with accessibility, then monetise through enterprise API contracts.

The honest caveat is that this only works if the newest closed models are meaningfully better than the last free ones, and if enterprise buyers are willing to route production traffic through Alibaba Cloud instead of running older Qwen weights on their own hardware. The reporting doesn't give you a conversion rate from open-source users to paying customers, and it doesn't say how much of that ¥3B is aimed at individual developers versus enterprise sales.

What is worth watching from here is less the model quality and more the cloud pricing and managed-inference story wrapped around it. If Alibaba can make the paid path cheaper or more reliable than self-hosting the previous generation, the open-source funnel becomes a real revenue engine. If it cannot, closing the flagship risks handing the self-hosted crown back to Llama.