Alibaba drops Qwen 3.7 API, withholds open weights

The API-only launch of Qwen 3.7 feels like a rushed stopgap against the surging popularity of Gemma in the local developer community. Until Alibaba open-sources the weights, developers are sticking with Gemma for its superior reasoning stability. Qwen 3.7 Max and Plus offer a 1M token context window and native Chain-of-Thought, accessible only via Alibaba's DashScope API. Local developers report Gemma provides cleaner code generation and avoids the multi-turn reasoning loops that plague some Qwen models. The community is actively pressuring Alibaba to release the Qwen 3.7 27B weights to allow for real-world hardware utilization benchmarks. This tension highlights the growing divide between API-first flagship releases and the demand for capable, mid-sized open-weight models.