Silicon Valley AI companies follow a familiar playbook: Keep the secret sauce behind an API, and charge for every drop. China’s open-source bet.
Silicon Valley AI companies follow a familiar playbook: Keep the secret sauce behind an API, and charge for every drop. China’s leading AI labs are playing a different game: They ship models as downloadable “open-weight” packages.
This strategy went mainstream after DeepSeek open-sourced its R1 reasoning model in January 2025. That model matched the performance of the best American systems, reportedly at a fraction of the cost.
China rode that momentum hard. A year after DeepSeek’s release, there’s now a cohort of Chinese open-source giants following the same blueprint, including Z.ai (formerly Zhipu), Moonshot, Alibaba’s Qwen, and MiniMax.