earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-export-is-wasted

This sentence overstates what the U.S. Entity List does. The BIS Entity List is not a general prohibition on contracting with a listed company.

BIS's own FAQ explains that the Entity List imposes specific license requirements for exports, reexports, and transfers of items subject to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). BIS also says that transactions with listed entities are a red flag and should be approached with caution — but that is different from a blanket rule that a U.S. company "cannot contract" with them.

Another BIS FAQ is even more explicit: "a person's inclusion on the Entity List does not create a prohibition on purchases from that person." So the legal claim in the post is too absolute. Depending on the item, the service, and whether something subject to the EAR is being exported or transferred, some transactions may require a license or be denied — but Entity List status by itself does not categorically bar all contracts.

The claim says buyers such as Chinese state-owned enterprises "only buy on-prem software." Official vendor materials contradict that.

Tencent's own corporate site says Tencent Cloud serves organizations including Bank of China, China Construction Bank, People's Insurance Company of China, State Grid Corporation of China, and COFCO. Those are not on-prem-only relationships; they are listed as Tencent Cloud customers.

Alibaba's official documentation for Alibaba Gov Cloud likewise says the service is designed for government agencies, public institutions, and state-owned enterprises, and explicitly says users do not need to build an on-premises data center. It also says the service supports on-demand purchase and pay-as-you-go for these entities.

That does not mean on-prem deployment is unimportant in China; it clearly is. But the article's absolute wording — that such buyers only buy on-prem software — is contradicted by official evidence that major SOEs and public-sector entities also buy cloud services.

This statement is too broad. Some Qwen weights are Apache-2.0 licensed, but not all of them are.

On the official Hugging Face page for Qwen/Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, the model is labeled "License: qwen-research", and the embedded license text says it is for "research or evaluation purposes only" unless a separate commercial license is requested.

Alibaba's own Qwen GitHub README also distinguishes licenses within the family: it states the source code is Apache 2.0, but notes that Qwen-1.8B is licensed under the Tongyi Qianwen Research License Agreement. So the blanket claim that all weights are released under Apache 2.0 is incorrect.