Alibaba has discontinued its free tier for Qwen Code, reducing the free request quota and directing users to third-party providers. Meanwhile, MiniMax changed its licensing terms for its AI models, requiring authorization for commercial use, amid a trend in the Chinese AI sector toward proprietary developments.

Decrypt

2026-04-17 16:26:00

Abstract generation in progress

In brief

Alibaba shut down the free tier of Qwen Code.
Users are directed to check third-party providers like OpenRouter.
Recently, Minimax also changed its license from open source to open weights, with conditions for commercial use.

Alibaba’s Qwen Code killed its free tier today. The message in the GitHub repo doesn’t mince words: “Qwen OAuth free tier has been discontinued.” Alibaba also reduced the 1,000 free requests quota to 100 per day. Users wanting to run Qwen code on the cloud are now directed to check Alibaba Cloud Coding Plan, OpenRouter, Fireworks AI, or bring their own API key. Qwen Code wasn’t a hobby project. It was Alibaba’s terminal coding agent—a direct Claude Code rival running Qwen3-Coder models, with multi-file repository support and SWE-Bench (a benchmark that measures how good a model is at coding) scores competitive with the best paid tools on the market.

If you’re just finding out now, you missed the GitHub changelog. The Coding Plan Pro subscription runs $50 a month. This landed 48 hours after fellow Chinese AI company MiniMax pulled almost the same move. The Chinese lab dropped M2.7—a 230 billion-parameter model that nearly matches Claude Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks—then immediately rewrote the license to require written authorization for commercial use.

Did you know?

Parameters are what determine an AI’s capacity to learn, reason, and store information. The more parameters, the wider the model’s breadth of knowledge.

The model launched under what MiniMax called “MIT-style” terms. MIT licenses don’t restrict commercial use. The developer community on Hacker News and Hugging Face noticed within hours.

MiniMax said it was protecting against bad-faith hosting providers who were shipping degraded versions under its name. “They walk away thinking MiniMax is mid,” the company’s Head of Developer Relations posted. The commercial restriction stayed anyway. Neither move is accidental. The Financial Times reported that Alibaba’s own Qwen team has been moving toward proprietary development after key leadership departures. Xiaomi, another Chinese company, shipped MiMo v2 last month under a closed-source license. Chinese open-source models went from 1.2% of global open-model usage in late 2024 to roughly 30% by end of 2025. Qwen overtook Meta’s Llama as the most deployed self-hosted model on the planet. That adoption wasn’t built on benchmarks. It was built on free services. With U.S. chip export controls tightening and the Beijing-Washington AI race grinding on, “free” is harder to defend when investors want returns and the U.S. government is watching every deployment decision. Those wanting to play with Alibaba’s models locally, and free, are still able to do so. Their models remain open source, but the more powerful ones require pretty heavy hardware to run.

This page may contain third-party content, which is provided for information purposes only (not representations/warranties) and should not be considered as an endorsement of its views by Gate, nor as financial or professional advice. See Disclaimer for details.