Well, if you look at Alibaba's financials for FY 2026 https://data.alibabagroup.com/ecms-files/1514443390/5b9061ed... their sales and marketing expenses rose by about 100 billion RMB (10% of revenue), "primarily attributable to the investment in user experiences of Alibaba China E-commerce Group and user acquisition of Qwen app."

So it seems like it's very important to them that people use the Qwen app and they're willing to pay a lot of money for that. Presumably someone thought that keeping their best models closed would drive more business to them (as the sole provider) but then they discovered that closed releases mostly get ignored unless they're really good. (See also: People who think that Chinese AI companies are required to release weights as a matter of policy, because the closed ones hardly ever show up in the news.) Releasing weights for Qwen 3.8 at least lets them get some of that "pretty good for the price of free" media buzz.

They’re also trying to take an axe to the lead the US has in the field at a time when sovereignty and “owning your platform” are the words of the day. Open source/open weight LLMs can steal the lunch of US competitors even if they aren’t the best of the best.

t that keeping their best models closed would drive more business to them (as the sole provider) but then they discovered that closed releases mostly get ignored unless they're really good. But it's different since they don't have access to the american ones the companies there could make it all closed source