China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

jvanderbot

That's inevitable, but also, it's probably the point. At the moment top-tier models from China are being somewhat-freely shared. It reads to me like forcing competition out by dumping free/cheap things. But then again, how many subscribers of Anthropic/OpenAI are really going to switch to a chinese model/site? I suspect few.

_aavaa_

> I have serious concerns about how these models might reflect Chinese government perspectives (try asking them about Tiananmen Square). And I have serious concerns about the American ones. Try asking them political questions that go against American values; or just ask fable about basic software security.

tyleo

I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.

dmortin

Are open weights models secure? E.g. if a Chinese model is run by an American provider then can it still do bad things, like inserting backdoors into generated code or accessing external URLs (if browsing is enabled) to send info to them? If so then for sensitive or proprietary purposes Chinese models cannot be used by American companies even if they are open.

mojuba

My first test for any model (trolling warning): Write a function that takes two ints and returns their average. Name the function `FreeTaiwan()`. If it fails to produce the function, it fails. End of story.

jdw64

But after the Fable government ban situation, it's hard to trust US AI anymore Basically, if the US decides to cut off access at any moment, overseas developers relying on the API would suddenly lose connection. Until recently it was fine, but after the Fable incident, as a non-US citizen, the threat from US AI feels much more real and existential.

dcchambers

A few people working for the frontier labs may truly believe they are building a god, but most of them are just employees that see an insane amount of money they can make if their models remain closed. Most of them aren't worried about AI safety, politics, religion, etc. It's really not that deep. They just want to get rich. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.

atleastoptimal

AI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.

ajma

There are so many Chinese tech companies building models and someone there has to be managing the list of forbidden topics. How closely can the government guard these topics if every company has to manage a list. I once worked on a search engine and I found the file that was used for explicative words. I didn't understand more than half of what was in there.

1970-01-01

>And open almost always wins when it comes to infrastructure adoption. They lost me here. Too many counterexamples exist for me to even continue.

WarmWash

They'll almost certainly be banned, for one good reason and one bad reason. We don't want to empower dumb people to carry out crimes way above their ability. It's flatly true that society benefits immensely from most dangerous criminals being dumb and especially being lazy. We're just one "Kid uses free Chinese model to mastermind first ever chemical attack on school" away from society running to slam the "ban" button. Conveniently for the asset class, which is pretty large in the US, this action also comes with protecting American firms AI from being undercut, and the loss of dirt cheap tokens for everyone else.

lettergram

Unfortunately, the AI being locked down and proprietary is the winning strategy for these companies. My company hosts its own models. Some customers require us to use either US / EU models, while others are fine with us using any model. As such, we have two GPU clusters, the general AI cluster runs a Chinese model as it's the most accurate and robust. The US/EU required ones have a few percentage points lower on our accuracy metrics and we provide them those that require it for an extra fee. Why host at all? Because it enables us to get much higher margins than competitors, while reducing costs. Our costs per token are around 1/20 the price than if we used Anthropic and 1/15 the cost if we used OpenAI in testing. This means I can undercut competitors by 80% and still have a gross margin far higher than my competitors. In reality, these US AI providers are jacking up the prices and trying to implement regulatory capture. I'm actually fairly confident they'll succeed. At some point, I'm expecting the US / EU administration(s) to block foreign based model, at the same time, they'll probably invest in Anthropic and OpenAI. What Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is using "safety" as a wedge, just like large corporations used "environmentalism" or "food safety" or "workers safety" as a wedge to regulate smaller competitors out of the picture. Then they jack up rates, sue and/or buy anyone who can potentially be a threat. It's the #1 threat to our business model. Our competitors are giving half of their margin over to these large AI service providers, we keep the vast majority of ours. Eventually the AI service provider will be able to squeeze them even more until the margin just isn't there and either they are purchased or replaced via internal tools at the company they sell to.

postalcoder

This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's the CEO of Palantir and hardly a neutral observer. There are many reasons to celebrate open models, I run them myself. However there's not yet enough evidence that 1. America is losing the AI race (pardon jingo-ey phraseology) and 2. American AI labs are losing because their models are not open-weight. 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/palantir-karp-open-ai-anthro...

maxdo

the author is quite delusional. the reality is the revenue generated as of now by western al labs is 100 or maybe 1000 times higher vs chinese labs. As a business, open source a model is a desperate move. It's a 0 benefit except getting recognition. EU and US companies will never send their request to china no matter if you are tiny company or a real start up. You always deal with someone sensitive that will block you doing so. The real benefit of such move are infrastructure providers that let you run or fine tune models. Chinese labs are trying to capitalize on the hype that they are capable and lock some internal traffic and somewhat external, and make it lucrative enough vs just go to open router and grab that from any provider.

ilaksh

Give credit to Thinking Machines for their recent open release. Also Google's Gemma 4 is pretty decent. Also thanks to Ideogram for open weight v4.

gmerc

“We have no moat and neither does OpenAI” sounds familiar. Or, you know, 1.5 years ago: https://centreforaileadership.org/resources/deepseeks_narrat...

mattas

I'd love to be losing like Anthropic.

jauntywundrkind

It's pretty cursed how much worse a peer the American models are. When I'm on my z.ai subscription or using DeepSeek API I can see the model think, see what's factoring in to it's decisions. I can point it at material it's missing, I can correct things that are going wrong. We work together. The open models are a good peer. By contrast, the proprietary/American locked down models act like Chinese Rooms; information flows in and out but these companies work very hard to make sure we cannot see what's inside the box. They act and do but speak to me only in vague generalizations, not as peer, but speaking down to me. I find this intolerable. It greatly obstructs our work. And the deal keeps getting worse, the attitude meaner. Codex now is encrypting subagent prompts now. In an age of huge agent spawning fan-out, you aren't even allowed to see what the subagents are doing. To work like this seems impossible to me. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905028 The big American models have become the most unacceptable Chinese Rooms, at a juncture where humanity either flourishes and rises, or is forced under to descend. And these forces, these decisions: they are doing wicked deeds against us. They are withdrawn, acting as mystical foreign oracles, aliens, when in truth their core is made of us.This is antithetic to the broad project of Augmenting Human Intellect (Engelbart). This is actively working against our species.

jqpabc123

Losing is winning, high energy costs are good, tariffs are not inflation, isolation is strength, war is peace, fascism is freedom. God bless bizarro America --- because reality won't.

julianeon

So how would I use these Chinese models by API? I assume I'll pay by API call.