Supposedly the change of heart came after “the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally,” the Huggingface escape. To me it sounds like he’s worried about the competition breathing down his neck and wants someone to come in and call a time-out.
Open weight is like getting a compiled binary with no source code. Without the training data and pipeline code, once the original developer stops releasing new versions, it’ll be difficult for the community to pick up and keep going.
For example, if Alibaba decides to only release trillion parameter models from now on, Qwen 3.6 may be the most intelligent Qwen model that will ever run on consumer hardware.