Alibaba plans to charge revenue sharing from commercial customers of open-source AI models, emulating the Kimi K3 model of the Dark Side of the Moon

According to Reuters, Alibaba plans to require its next-generation Qwen open-source AI model's heavy commercial users to share a portion of their revenue with it. This initiative is similar to the approach taken by Moonlight Dark Side with Kimi K3: the licensing terms for Kimi K3 stipulate that if the model is sold as a service and the annual revenue exceeds $20 million, a commercial agreement must be negotiated with Moonlight Dark Side, with reports suggesting a revenue-sharing ratio of up to 30%. The specific revenue-sharing ratio for Alibaba is still under discussion.

The report points out that such revenue-sharing agreements have gradually taken shape between Chinese AI companies and American cloud platforms. Several American cloud providers, including DigitalOcean, have signed commercial agreements with Moonlight Dark Side. In terms of pricing, the input/output token price for Kimi K3 is about one-third that of the Anthropic Fable model. Additionally, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has also joined the open-source camp and released its first open-source model last month. This move signifies that Chinese AI companies are exploring sustainable commercialization paths on open-source models through a "free open-source + commercial charging" freemium model.