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.

Open sourcing is a complex decision so who knows what their calculations are.

But I'd assume that they're preparing for some sort of winner-take-all market in model quality where if they don't do anything the winner will be aggressive, hostile and American. Likely trying to push the Chinese economy back to the year 2000. If that is the starting point either the Chinese have to win the market (unlikely) or squeeze the profit out of it to make winning the market meaningless.

Publishing high quality open models is a well known tactic for profit squeezing. Being 2nd place with the same business model as the front-runner is a losing strategy in a winner-take-all market so they aren't going to bother with that. But if they can commoditize the model, their superior energy costs and likely coming chip manufacturing wave will hopefully give them a big advantage.

> How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends

Because they are playing the Americans at their own game.

What is the first thing an American company would do ?

Spread the old American classic FUD ... "you can't used this closed tool because its run by the communists", right ?

So you release it as open weights which is a win-win. Global adoption of the model and you get to give the American AI companies a kick in the nuts because you know they will never release open weights apart from highly quantised crippled shit.

The Chinese are also playing the long game. The gradual rebalancing of the world from the US-centric model of the past. If releasing models as open weights is part of that long game, then so be it.

I would guess the Chinese government has a strong wish to lift all Chinese AI boats and bets. That it sinks western closed weight Frontier Labs in the process would be just be gravy on top, no? Broadly, the difference between mercantilistic capitalism and western late stage capitalism IMO.

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