Prediction◆Article
Alibaba's reversal to release Qwen 3.8 Max as open weights, after declining to release Qwen 3.7 Max in May, may have been influenced by Xi Jinping's recent speech encouraging open source.
Ben Thompson theorizes that Alibaba's about-face on open-sourcing its Qwen model was shaped by a Xi Jinping speech pushing open-source collaboration. ✦ AI generated
Ben Thompson · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-20 · original ↗
Ben also theorizes that Alibaba's decision to release Qwen 3.8 Max as open weights - a reversal from their decision not to release Qwen 3.7 Max in May - may have been influenced by a recent speech by Xi Jinping.
Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation
- ·Alibaba declined to release Qwen 3.7 Max in May
- ·Later reversed course, releasing Qwen 3.8 Max as open weights
- ·Ben Thompson calls this an about-face
- ·Thompson theorizes political influence drove the reversal
- ·A recent Xi Jinping speech encouraged open-source collaboration
- ·Timing aligns with the policy signal
Around this claim
Mechanism · 2
China should seize the current historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration, and sharing.Xi Jinping · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 80%Qwen3.8-Max represents a strategic shift by Alibaba toward ecosystem influence over exclusivity and the shrinking of the moat to post-training, agent harnesses, inference infra, and developer lock-in rather than raw pretraining.AINews · Latent Space · conf 60%