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Alibaba opens both ends of Qwen3.8 — but only the small model gets Apache 2.0

Alibaba has now published downloadable weights for both halves of the Qwen3.8 generation, and the licences attached to them are not the same document. Qwen3.8-27B, released on 14 August, is a dense 27.78-billion-parameter vision-language model under a plain Apache 2.0 licence — no thresholds, no conditions, no separate agreement for commercial use. It takes text, images and video, has a native 262,144-token context that Alibaba says stretches to a million, and runs on Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and TokenSpeed. Alibaba's own benchmark table puts it at 61.7 on SWE-bench Pro against 57.6 for its closed Qwen3.7-Plus, and at 42.2 on DeepSWE 1.1 against 13.3 for the previous 27B generation — vendor-reported figures, not independently reproduced. The flagship went out under different terms. Qwen3.8-Max, 2.446 trillion parameters, is on Hugging Face as Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B in bf16 and FP8, but under a bespoke "Qwen3.8-Max License". Its text reads like a permissive licence for almost everyone: free use, modification, hosting, fine-tuning and resale. Two clauses change that at scale. A product with more than 100 million monthly active users or 20 million dollars in monthly revenue must display the model's name prominently in its interface. And any company running a model-as-a-service or an AI coding/office assistant business whose revenue passes 50 million dollars over twelve months must obtain a separate licence from Qwen before commercial use — internal deployment excepted. The practical effect is a licence aimed squarely at a handful of named competitors while leaving everyone below those thresholds fully free. It is a pattern worth watching: "open weights" is quietly becoming a spectrum, and the difference between the two Qwen3.8 downloads is not the code but the paragraph that comes with it. Both models are now in the catalogue, with the licence terms written out in full in the specification tables.