Alibaba is reportedly planning to charge large commercial users of its next open-weight Qwen model by taking a share of the revenue generated from the model’s use. The plan could be introduced as early as next week, but negotiations are still ongoing and the proposed percentage has not been finalized.
Alibaba currently charges customers that host and use its models through Alibaba Cloud, while customers running most of its open models in their own data centers generally do not pay model fees. The reported plan would extend the company’s monetization model to commercial deployments outside its cloud platform. [IT Home, in Chinese]