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Latest / Frontier models and safety

Model releaseFrontierChinaConfirmed

Alibaba releases Qwen3, eight open-weights models under Apache 2.0

See how this story connects

Source: QwenLM on GitHub: Qwen3Also reported by Simon Willison

Alibaba’s Qwen team released the Qwen3 family on 29 April 2025: six dense models from 0.6B to 32B parameters and two mixture-of-experts models, Qwen3-30B-A3B and Qwen3-235B-A22B. All are open weights under the Apache 2.0 licence, support more than 100 languages and dialects, and can switch step-by-step reasoning on or off.

Why it matters

Developers worldwide gained permissively licensed Chinese models in sizes for phones up to data centres, free for commercial use without the custom terms attached to rival open models.

When
29 Apr 2025
ID
WTA-N-2025-0060
Where
China
Who
Alibaba

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from QwenLM on GitHub and the reporting credited above. Checked against the source on 9 Oct 2026.

Read the original at QwenLM on GitHub

Source copy: download the page text as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: Led toMoonshot AI releases Kimi K2, a 1-trillion-parameter open-weights model

Cite this story

WTA-N-2025-0060: “Alibaba releases Qwen3, eight open-weights models under Apache 2.0.” wheresthe.ai, 29 Apr 2025. https://wheresthe.ai/d/cn-alibaba-qwen3-open-weights-2025-04/ (source: QwenLM on GitHub: Qwen3).

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