Qwen 通义千问
China · Hangzhou
alternative to GPT / Gemini / Llama / Mistral
Alibaba's Apache-licensed Qwen3.8 open-weight family for multimodal, coding and agentic work.
Why it fits
- ✓ Open weights
- ✓ Self-hostable
- AI stack
Regional alternatives
Model & licence
- Access
- open weights
- Licence
- Apache 2.0
- Modalities
- text, vision, code
- Context
- 256K
Capability rank #2 (manual, as of 2026-10). Editorial snapshot across public 2026 benchmark reports; rankings move often.
Independence & portability
Strategic independence · 98/100
- Deployment
- air gapped
- Data control
- self hosted
- Portability
- high
- Supply-chain
- high
- Ecosystem
- strategic
- Openness
- open source (15/15)
Procurement/migration signal, not a certification. As of 2026-10. Apache-licensed Qwen3.8 weights; 256K context with local Transformers, SGLang and vLLM deployment. How this is scored.
Regulatory & supply-chain notes
Draft for comment: Qwen3.8-Max (reported at about 2.4 trillion parameters) is above the draft's 2-trillion-parameter line. Weights already open-sourced, and serving the model abroad through an API, app or SaaS, stay outside the draft; a new open-source release would need an automatic licence and deployment on servers abroad a licence. Until the catalogue is final, exports of listed technology must be registered first.
China export control (MOFCOM) · MOFCOM/MOST Announcement No. 48 of 2026 (draft revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export, item 266504X) · draft, comments until 2026-11-15 · source ↗
US DoD Section 1260H list
The parent company, Alibaba Group Holding, is on the list.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited · parent group listed · as of 2026-10 · source ↗
A list of “Chinese military companies”. Since 30 June 2026 the Department of Defense may not contract with listed companies; from 30 June 2027 that extends to goods and services that include their products. It does not restrict anyone else buying or using the product.
Company & market
- Parent company
- Alibaba
- Registered
- Hangzhou
- Listing
- US-listed
- Market cap / val. (USD)
- via Alibaba
- Foreign-investable
- Yes
- Global 500 #63
- China 500 #18