---
title: "Tsai sells Europe open weights; Alibaba's safety record is seven results in 238 releases"
description: "Chairman Joe Tsai is pitching open weights as Europe's road to AI independence while Alibaba Cloud negotiates Spanish solar power and first cloud regions in three more countries. The disclosure record behind the pitch: seven published safety results across 238 releases."
publisher: "The Inference"
section: "Frontier"
published: 2026-10-09T01:22:11.326Z
modified: 2026-10-09T01:22:11.326Z
canonical: https://theinference.org/article/tsai-sells-europe-open-weights-alibaba-s-safety-record-is-seven-results-in-238-releases
language: en
keywords: "Alibaba, Joe Tsai, Open Weights, AI Safety, Europe, Cloud"
---

# Tsai sells Europe open weights; Alibaba's safety record is seven results in 238 releases

> Chairman Joe Tsai is pitching open weights as Europe's road to AI independence while Alibaba Cloud negotiates Spanish solar power and first cloud regions in three more countries. The disclosure record behind the pitch: seven published safety results across 238 releases.

## Alibaba is building the infrastructure Tsai says Europe lacks

Joe Tsai [told founders in Turin on October 7](https://thenextweb.com/news/alibaba-joe-tsai-open-source-ai-sovereignty-europe-wave-by-vento) that open weights are "the only way" [for Europe to be independent in AI](https://theinference.org/article/freiburg-s-frontier-lab-tells-europe-to-cheer-up-on-american-money) [1]. Take a model, train it on local factory data, run it in your own data center, and, in his words, a company no longer depends on the original developer [1].

The concrete arrived the same week: [Alibaba](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/alibaba) is in [preliminary talks with solar producer Solaria](https://thenextweb.com/news/alibaba-solaria-spain-data-centre) to power a data center at Puertollano, south of Madrid, and has approached other suppliers [2]. First cloud regions in Türkiye, Finland and the Netherlands follow within 12 months, after France, live since June [1][3]. Eddie Wu [targets more than 20 gigawatts of global capacity by 2032](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202610/08/WS6ac70cfde4b06d4aa0561b0c.html) and says industry demand "far outpaces our supply capabilities" [3][4].

## $25 billion a year in, RMB10.9 billion a quarter out

The buildout runs on e-commerce cash: about $25 billion a year of free cash flow, capital spending doubled three years running, [quarterly profit already cut 75% by the bill](https://theinference.org/article/china-is-closing-the-ai-gap-profits-are-the-harder-test) [1]. Jefferies still [made Alibaba a top pick on October 8](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/alibaba-cloud-revenue-growth-seen-182500404.html), forecasting AI Cloud and Compute revenue up more than 50% to RMB60.5 billion this quarter against AI Lab losses of RMB10.9 billion [5].

The market being bought is a price war, and the cheap seats are Chinese. [Anthropic](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/anthropic) [cut Haiku 5.5 to $0.10 per million input tokens](https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-claude-haiku-5-5/); Qwen3.7 Flash lists at $0.03, a rate that holds only to 32,000 input tokens, above which it costs $0.10, Haiku's tier [6].

*Chart: **Qwen3.7 Flash undercuts Haiku 5.5 threefold, but only to 32,000 tokens** Column chart comparing input token prices: Anthropic Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million tokens, Qwen3.7 Flash at $0.03 up to 32,000 tokens, and $0.10 above 32,000 tokens.*

*Listed input prices per million tokens, October 2026. Qwen3.7 Flash's $0.03 rate applies only to the first 32,000 input tokens, above which it matches Haiku 5.5's $0.10. Sources: The New Stack (6). [6]*

## Seven results in 238 releases

*Chart: **857 Chinese model releases since 2021; nine shipped with a safety result in hand** Bar chart: 857 total model releases by nine leading Chinese developers since 2021, against 31 with any published safety result and 9 with a result available at launch.*

*Releases by nine leading Chinese AI developers (ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax, StepFun), 2021 to September 15, 2026. A result is a developer-published quantitative safety finding tied to the named release. Source: SemiAnalysis release census. [7]*

SemiAnalysis counted 857 releases by nine leading Chinese developers since 2021: 31 carried any published safety result, nine at launch [7]. Alibaba's own line is 238 releases, seven results, three at launch, and no Chinese frontier text model has ever shipped with a dangerous-capability evaluation [7].

## Brussels writes duties by compute, not license

[Washington's September 29 accord is voluntary](https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/trump-ai-giants-super-intelligence/) and creates no new requirements [8]. Brussels can demand evaluations before release, restrict EU market access and [fine up to 3% of turnover, whatever the provider's address](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/03/eu-ai-act-enforcement-powers.html); refusing an information request or blocking an evaluation is fineable on its own [9]. Systemic-risk duties trigger at 10^25 FLOP of training compute [7], and every general-purpose model sold in Europe must document its training data for the AI Office [10].

The two camps talk past each other. Tsai says the closed US labs no longer publish because they do not want to share [1]; Zhu Songchun of the Beijing Institute for General AI calls extinction talk "Oppenheimer-style marketing" [7]. The regulator that fines blocked evaluations faces a lab with three launch-day results in five years [7].

## Madrid's decree comes first, then the December print

Nothing yet says Brussels will aim compute-triggered duties at open-weight Chinese models, and nobody has said an EU subsidiary of a Chinese parent fails Spain's establishment test [2]. If they bite, the international leg funding RMB10.9 billion-a-quarter lab losses is the leg that gets repriced. The dates are set: Madrid's government wants its rules published by the end of the year [2], then comes Alibaba's December-quarter print, where Jefferies expects growth to accelerate [5].

## Takeaway

Tsai's open-weights pitch to Europe rides a buildout funded by $25 billion a year of e-commerce cash, but Alibaba's disclosure record is seven published safety results across 238 releases, and Brussels' compute-triggered duties could reprice the international leg that pays for the lab's RMB10.9 billion quarterly losses.

## Sources

1. [The Next Web, "Alibaba's Joe Tsai says open source is Europe's only way to AI independence", 8 October 2026](https://thenextweb.com/news/alibaba-joe-tsai-open-source-ai-sovereignty-europe-wave-by-vento)
2. [The Next Web, "Alibaba in early talks with Spain's Solaria over power for a data centre", 2 October 2026](https://thenextweb.com/news/alibaba-solaria-spain-data-centre)
3. [China Daily, "Alibaba in early talks on Spain data center power supply", 8 October 2026](https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202610/08/WS6ac70cfde4b06d4aa0561b0c.html)
4. [Reuters, "Alibaba deepens AI push with new chip, bigger model; shares jump 5%", 21 September 2026](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/alibaba-plans-ai-model-with-5-trillion-10-trillion-parameters-unveils-new-chip-2026-09-22/)
5. [Proactive via Yahoo Finance, "Alibaba cloud revenue growth seen above 50% in financial year 2028, Jefferies maintains 'buy' rating", 8 October 2026](https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/alibaba-cloud-revenue-growth-seen-182500404.html)
6. [The New Stack, "Anthropic launches Haiku 5.5 at a much lower price", 7 October 2026](https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-claude-haiku-5-5/)
7. [SemiAnalysis, "Beijing Will Not Pace the Frontier: China's Speed-First AI Safety Regime", October 2026](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/beijing-will-not-pace-the-frontier)
8. [Infosecurity Magazine, "Trump, Six AI Giants Sign 'Super Intelligence' Safety Accord", 30 September 2026](https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/trump-ai-giants-super-intelligence/)
9. [CNBC, "Anthropic, OpenAI among firms facing new scrutiny under EU AI Act enforcement powers", 3 August 2026](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/03/eu-ai-act-enforcement-powers.html)
10. [Help Net Security, "EU begins enforcing AI Act, putting AI models under the microscope", 4 August 2026](https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/08/04/eu-ai-act-enforcement-ai-models/)


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Tsai sells Europe open weights; Alibaba's safety record is seven results in 238 releases — The Inference. Canonical: https://theinference.org/article/tsai-sells-europe-open-weights-alibaba-s-safety-record-is-seven-results-in-238-releases