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Z-Image

Alibaba (Tongyi-MAI)

Z-Image is an image generation model line from Alibaba (Tongyi-MAI). The latest release is Z-Image (27 Jan 2026). This page tracks all 2 Z-Image releases since 26 Nov 2025, with specs, licensing, and how to access each one. Official site →

Z-Image

Open weightsFreeCommunity APISelf-host

Foundation model behind Turbo; higher quality and diversity than Turbo; supports negative prompting and wide style range; suitable for fine-tuning and downstream development

License
Apache 2.0
Commercial use
Allowed
Availability
Self-host, Community API
Parameters
6B
Architecture
Scalable Single-Stream DiT (S3-DiT)
Inference Steps
50

License confirmed Apache 2.0 (github.com/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image/blob/main/LICENSE). Date: README news entry is Jan 27 - using Jan 27.

Z-Image-Turbo

Open weightsFreeCommunity APISelf-host

Distilled from Z-Image base via Decoupled-DMD + DMDR (RL); sub-second inference on H800; #1 open-source on Artificial Analysis T2I leaderboard at launch; strong bilingual (EN/ZH) text rendering

License
Apache 2.0
Commercial use
Allowed
Availability
Self-host, Community API
Parameters
6B
Architecture
Scalable Single-Stream DiT (S3-DiT)
Inference Steps
8

License confirmed Apache 2.0 (github.com/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image/blob/main/LICENSE). Date: README news entry is Nov 26 - using Nov 26.

See Z-Image in context on the image model timeline, or browse all model families.