3.5-plus was also only available via api. I don’t know what the long term business model for open weights is, I hope there is one, but it seems foolish to assume that companies will be willing to spend millions of dollars of compute on an asset worth zero in perpetuity.

They've always had closed-source variants:

- Qwen3.5-Plus

- Qwen3-Max

- Qwen2.5-Max

etc. Nothing really changed so far.

They always did that. Did they say anywhere they'd open all their models? They still have a business.