Alibaba’s Qwen3.7-Plus supports text, video and imagery inputs at low cost of $0.4/$1.6 per 1M token — but it’s proprietary
Publish Date: 2026-06-02 18:40:00
Source Domain: venturebeat.com
Alibaba this week released Qwen3.7-Plus, the latest AI large language model (LLM) in its globally beloved and increasingly expansive Qwen family, boasting more multimodal capabilities and a 60% lower cost than the prior, text-only Qwen3.7-Max model released just weeks ago.
However, like its immediate predecessor Qwen3.7-Plus is available only under a “closed” commercial license via proprietary application programming interfaces (API) and Qwen Chat.
That marks a big departure from the Qwen strategy to date, which was focused mainly on releasing powerful,near state-of-the-art open source models. Those enterprises and users who relied on the open source Qwen models — among them, U.S. giants such as Airbnb — will no doubt be disappointed to see that Alibaba is going closed for its newer releases.
Still, the model is worth a look because of its low cost and high performance on multimodal tasks like creating enterprise-grade visuals or analyzing video, imagery and screenshots, which Qwen3.7-Max cannot do (it’s text-only). It is among the cheaper powerful AI models available now, coming in price-wise just above Chinese rival’s new MiniMax-M3’s limited-time discount pricing.
