Chinese AI giants pivot toward proprietary models to drive revenue, performance

Chinese companies including Alibaba Cloud and Zhipu AI have opted not to open-source some of their latest artificial intelligence models as they look to capture the full value of their usage through official revenue generating channels.

While none of the companies have said that they are moving away from their open-source strategies, the development reflects an industry trend where the most powerful models are growing in size, making them increasingly difficult to host on local hardware.

This week, Alibaba released three proprietary models that were all accessible only via its official cloud platform or chatbot website.

These included Qwen3.6-Plus, a model with enhanced coding abilities, and Qwen3.5-Omni, a multimodal model that can process text, audio, images and video. The previous generation of the Omni model released in September, the Qwen3-Omni, was open-sourced.

According to an Alibaba Cloud spokesperson, the latest version will not be open-sourced as the Omni series is less popular among developers, based on download figures on open-source AI platform Hugging Face.

Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.