The head of Alibaba's Qwen project, Liu Dayi Heng, has said that future Qwen 4.0 and Qwen 5.0 models will continue to be released as weights are public and freely usable under a license.">open source. The statement follows rumors circulating in recent days that Qwen4 would be the last open-weight series, with later releases available only through APIs.
The statement was shared on Reddit in the r/LocalLLaMA community, where the post reached more than 3,800 upvotes and 400 comments. According to Liu Dayi Heng, the value of AI should not belong to a few people but become a foundational capability that users worldwide can access, use and help create.
Image: huggingface — https://github.com/huggingface/Qwen2.5-Coder
Qwen's numbers so far
The series has surpassed 3 billion cumulative downloads worldwide, with more than 460 open-source models released and over 300,000 derivative models. Only one source describes Qwen as the most widely downloaded open-weight model family in the world.
Qwen is developed by Alibaba Cloud. The statement confirms for the future a strategy already visible in recent releases: Qwen3.8-27B, for instance, was published with open weights on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license and can run on a single 17 GB GPU, as covered in our article on that release.
Qwen4 is close, but the weights are not out yet
The context is a launch expected soon. At the Apsara conference in Amsterdam on October 29, Alibaba Cloud CTO Feifei Li was reportedly heard saying Qwen4 would arrive the following week. The remark was relayed by an attendee and does not appear in the official conference press release, which concerns a new cloud region in the Netherlands. In our coverage of the Qwen4 family announcement at September's Yunqi Conference, Alibaba had outlined Max, Flash and Plus variants plus a 27-billion-parameter model.
Image: kesjam — https://github.com/kesjam/qwen2-vl
For now there is no model card, license or downloadable weights for Qwen4. References to names such as qwen4-max, qwen4-plus and qwen4-coder-plus appear in the qwen-code repository, with hints of a one-million-token context window. These are technical signals, not official announcements.
The license question
The decisive question remains the license. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, released with open weights, is described by one source as carrying a custom rather than permissive license, and the community is asking whether Qwen4 will follow the same path. The statement addresses weight availability, not terms of use, and on that point the available information is not yet definitive.
For those evaluating Qwen for business or local use, the detail to check will be the license attached to Qwen4, more than the simple fact that weights are published.
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