Alibaba Group is a Chinese technology conglomerate spanning e-commerce, cloud computing and logistics. Through Alibaba Cloud it publishes two of the most important open model families we cover: Qwen for language and multimodal models and Wan for video generation.
Qwen: from fully open to a split strategy
Qwen launched in September 2023 and became one of the most downloaded open model families. Qwen3 (April 2025) and Qwen3.6 (April 2026) shipped under Apache 2.0, while Qwen3.5 (February 2026) split between open checkpoints and a proprietary Plus variant, and Qwen3.7 (mid-2026) was proprietary at the top end.
Qwen3.8-Max, released on August 3, 2026, is the family’s flagship: a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts served through Alibaba’s API with a 1M-token context and text, image and video input. Alibaba then published the underlying checkpoint as Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B (95B active parameters) on Hugging Face under a custom qwen3.8-max license. The open release is text-only with thinking mode required, and a Qwen3.8-27B model under Apache 2.0 is the realistic path for local deployment.
Wan: open video generation
Wan is Alibaba’s video-generation line. Our Wan AI video explainer walks through Wan 2.1 and 2.2 (text-to-video, image-to-video, ComfyUI support and consumer-GPU options, with Wan 2.1 under Apache 2.0). Wan 3.0 extends the line to multi-input generation and clips of up to 30 seconds. Wan models also anchor our round-up of the best open-source AI video generators.
Why it matters for builders
- Qwen checkpoints are a default choice in our open-source LLM guide because of their size range and, for most releases, permissive licensing.
- License terms now differ by release: Apache 2.0 for many open models, a custom license for Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, and API-only access for some flagships. Check each model card.
- Wan remains one of the few video families with weights you can run on your own GPU.
Facts on this page were last checked on September 23, 2026 against Qwen’s Hugging Face model cards, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max announcement coverage and our own Wan reporting. See our corrections policy if you spot something out of date.