# Qwen: Alibaba's Open-Weight Language Models

> Qwen is Alibaba's family of language models, many with open weights. Current Qwen3.8 releases, licenses, and why Qwen has no crawler to block.

Qwen is a family of large language models from the Qwen team at Alibaba Group. Many Qwen models have open weights (model files that anyone can download) on Hugging Face and ModelScope. A model does not browse the web by itself, and we found no Alibaba documentation of a crawler or user agent for Qwen.

## Current models

The [Qwen3.8 GitHub repository](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3.8) covers the Qwen3.5, Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.8 series. Its news list gives these release dates:

| Release | Date |
|---|---|
| Qwen3.5, first model 397B-A17B | 2026-02-16 |
| Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | 2026-04-16 |
| Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B | 2026-08-12 |
| Qwen3.8-27B | 2026-08-14 |

The README says that Qwen3.8 is the first open release of a Qwen-Max-class model. Licenses differ by model. For example, [Qwen3.8-27B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B) uses Apache 2.0, and [Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B) has a different license. Read the model card before you use a model.

## Qwen apps

The README links to Qwen Studio at chat.qwen.ai, a web app for the models. For Alibaba's assistant app, see the [Tongyi Qianwen guide](/ai-chat-bot/tongyi-qianwen/).

## Web access

A Qwen model generates text from the input that it gets. It does not search the web or send requests to websites. If an app that uses Qwen also reads web pages, the request comes from that app. Look for the user agent of that app in your logs, not for Qwen.

## What a site owner can do

We found no robots.txt token for Qwen in Alibaba's documentation in October 2026. You cannot target Qwen in robots.txt. To find and block AI crawlers in general, see [How to find and block AI crawlers](/ai-crawler-bot/introduction-to-ai-crawlers/).

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