[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Chinese AI companies such as Alibaba and Zhipu AI are focusing on monetisation by not releasing their latest models as open source and instead providing access through cloud platforms, the South China Morning Post reported on Wednesday local time.

Alibaba this week launched three proprietary models, including the coding-focused Qwen3.6-Plus and the multimodal Qwen3.5-Omni, which can process text, audio, images and video. It made them available only through its cloud platform and chatbot website.

Alibaba in September last year released a trillion-parameter model for the first time and has kept it proprietary. Alibaba released the previous Qwen3-Omni as open source, but is providing the 3.5 version as a closed model.

Alibaba Cloud cited Hugging Face download figures as a reason, saying the Omni series is relatively less popular among developers.

Qwen researcher Chujie Zheng (Zheng Chujie) said on X, formerly Twitter, that building a flagship model with state-of-the-art performance is always the top priority. Releasing smaller models that are less competitive is not particularly important or urgent, he said.

Since the launch of DeepSeek R1 in January last year, Chinese companies have led the global open-source ecosystem. On Hugging Face, Qwen has more derivative models in the developer community than Google and Meta combined. Its growth has been driven largely by releasing many smaller models with billions of parameters, allowing developers worldwide to download and use them freely.

Zhipu AI Chief Executive Peng Zhang (Zhang Peng), which provides the GLM model series, said on a post-earnings conference call that customers who initially planned to deploy open-source models on their own servers are gradually switching to using cloud-based APIs. Zhang added there is no longer a need to rely on open source to raise overseas recognition.

Profitable AI products in China, including Kuaishou's video-generation tool Kling AI, are already running on non-public models, the South China Morning Post reported.