Alibaba Released a Free Image Model, but Its License Bars Commercial Use

Alibaba's Qwen team published the weights of a new image model, Qwen-Image-2.1, on Sept. 20. The team posted the files on Hugging Face and ModelScope under a license that allows research and evaluation only.

The team's own repository describes the release as one model that does two jobs: making pictures from a written prompt and editing pictures it is handed. The same model can produce images with a transparent background, edit transparent layers, and lift a subject out of a photograph. Alibaba published no benchmark comparison with the weights, and no independent evaluation of the model has appeared.

The repository calls the release open-source. The document the weights ship under is not an open-source license. The Qwen Research License Agreement, dated Sept. 20, 2026, grants the right to use, copy, modify, and redistribute the model for non-commercial purposes only, and it defines non-commercial as research or evaluation. Commercial use requires a separate license from the company. Anyone redistributing the model has to pass the agreement on, mark any modified files, and label anything trained or fine-tuned on it as built with Qwen.

The same repository puts the generating half of the model at 7 billion parameters. It takes up to 10 reference images for a single composition, accepts local edits marked with circles, painted annotations or separate masks, and produces images at 2K resolution.

It also lists same-day support from five outside software projects that run the model, among them Hugging Face's Diffusers library and ComfyUI.