Qwen (Alibaba)
Also known as: Qwen3, Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba Qwen
Qwen is the language model family from Alibaba Cloud, the cloud business of China’s Alibaba Group. The family ranks among the most widely used open-source LLMs worldwide – with variants from smartphone-sized models to data-center scale.
Current generation
The Qwen3 series evolves in rapid bursts: Qwen3.5 (February 2026) supports more than 200 languages, and Qwen3.6 followed in April 2026 with open weights. The top model Qwen3.7 Max (May 2026), however, remains proprietary and API-only.
Strengths: code and languages
Qwen models perform strongly on programming tasks – the Coder variants are among the most popular open code models. Broad language coverage also makes the family attractive for multilingual applications.
License and self-hosting
The open Qwen models are released under the Apache 2.0 license – a genuine open-source license with no usage restrictions. Companies can download the weights and run them as self-hosted AI.
Data protection context
Using Qwen via the Alibaba Cloud API means processing data in the infrastructure of a Chinese provider. Self-hosting fully separates the model from its maker – data stays inside the company. For context, see digital sovereignty.
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Last updated: June 2026