Alibaba Plans Revenue Sharing for Commercial Use of Qwen3.8-Max

Alibaba Group plans to charge large commercial users of its next-generation open-source artificial intelligence models a revenue share. Previously, the company only charged developers who accessed the models through its cloud computing platform, while most open-source models allow customers to deploy them in their own data centres and use them free of charge. The new mechanism has not been formally announced, negotiations are still under way, and the sharing ratio has yet to be determined.

Domestic artificial intelligence company Moonshot's Kimi K3 model, released in July 2026, is also an open-weight model, and its licence agreement includes an additional fee clause: any company that packages the model as a commercial service and generates annual revenue exceeding US$20 million must sign a commercial revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot, which can take up to 30 percent of revenue. Alibaba's plan to introduce the same sharing mechanism for its own open-source models has not previously been disclosed.

Hong Kong-listed IT services company China Software International (00354. HK) disclosed in a regulatory announcement in July 2026 that it had reached a revenue-sharing agreement with Moonshot, but did not disclose the sharing ratio. Paddy Srinivasan, chief executive of US cloud computing company DigitalOcean, confirmed that the company has signed a commercial agreement with Moonshot but declined to reveal specific details. Several US companies have launched Kimi K3 and other Chinese artificial intelligence models.