Alibaba releases HappyHorse 1.0 via API amid confusion over open source claims

Alibaba’s HappyHorse 1.0 artificial intelligence video model is now available through an official API partnership with fal.ai. While the model has been benchmarked favorably in video generation tasks, the status of its release remains a subject of industry scrutiny due to conflicting information regarding its source code.

Despite numerous third-party websites claiming the model was released as fully open-source with commercial licensing, no independently verifiable model weights or official source code have been published. Although a model card exists on HuggingFace citing an Apache 2.0 license, reports indicate that the associated files have not been accessible to the public.

The industry has seen a proliferation of unofficial landing pages, some of which falsely claimed to distribute the model. The official development team behind the project has previously cautioned that many sites utilizing the HappyHorse name are not affiliated with the developers and may be misleading users.

Currently, the model is offered strictly as a cloud-based API service. The gap between the marketing claims of a fully open-source repository and the reality of a closed API launch continues to persist, as no downloadable files have been verified.