Alibaba confirmed Qwen 3 235B-A22B (the 235B-total / 22B-active MoE flagship) ships under Apache 2.0 — fully permissive commercial use. This makes it the largest open-weight model with truly permissive licensing, surpassing DeepSeek V3 (which has additional terms in the DeepSeek License) and Llama 3.3 70B (Llama Community License with usage restrictions).
For commercial production deployments without licensing review overhead, this is meaningful.
▼ OPERATOR ANGLE
**For new commercial production**: Qwen 3 235B-A22B is now the strongest "no license worries" pick at the 100B+ tier. MoE serving cost (22B active) competitive with 70B dense models.
**For replacing Llama 3.3 70B in commercial pipelines**: real upgrade path on capability with cleaner licensing. Migration cost is the serving framework switch (vLLM MoE routing) and prompt re-tuning.
**For evaluation**: run your specific workload — Qwen 3 reasoning is comparable to DeepSeek V3 at lower serving cost; English-chat polish is on par with Llama 3.3.
See [Qwen 3 235B-A22B verdict](/models/qwen-3-235b-a22b), [Qwen family hub](/families/qwen), [Llama family hub](/families/llama) for license comparison.