Alibaba Group Holding has made the core files of its latest flagship AI model Qwen3.8-Max free to download, introducing new rules requiring large companies to pay for a separate commercial licence. The terms apply to users or their affiliates running a “model as a service” or “AI work assistant” business whose aggregate revenue exceeds US$50 million over any consecutive 12-month period, who must obtain a separate licence from Qwen before commercial use. Internal use is exempt if the software, outputs, or underlying model capabilities are not made available to third parties. Releasing Qwen3.8-Max’s weights marks a shift from Alibaba’s recent strategy of keeping its most advanced Max models proprietary. Most developers can use, copy, modify, and distribute the model, which has 2.4 trillion parameters, without paying Alibaba, though they must bear compute costs. Paid access via application programming interfaces (APIs) is also available: in China, the API costs 12 yuan (US$1.80) per million input tokens and 36 yuan per million output tokens; internationally, rates are US$2 per million input tokens and US$6 per million output tokens. At these prices, Qwen3.8-Max’s input and output rates are about 40 per cent and 24 per cent, respectively, of Claude Opus 5 from Anthropic.