How China overtook the US in the global market for open AI models

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have built powerful frontier models but restricted access through APIs, subscription platforms or enterprise contracts. Their most advanced systems—including those under development in 2025—remain entirely closed, with neither weights nor training data made public.

China’s major AI groups have taken a very different approach. DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud, the two most downloaded contributors among Chinese developers, release frequent iterations of open models that are smaller, faster and easier to fine-tune. These models have become favourites among smaller companies and independent developers across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Chinese models find global traction

DeepSeek’s R1 model, unveiled earlier this year, jolted the global AI community. Despite being trained at a fraction of the cost and computational power of US rivals, R1 demonstrated sophisticated reasoning capabilities that rivalled much larger American models. Its release triggered widespread discussion over whether US labs, despite their vast compute budgets, could maintain their competitive edge.

Alibaba’s Qwen series has also become a dominant force in the open-model ecosystem, offering variations optimised for text generation, coding tasks and multimodal work. Both companies have adopted a rapid release schedule, shipping new models weekly or biweekly, in stark contrast to the six-month or yearly cycles typical among large US labs.

Creative approaches despite chip restrictions

US export controls on advanced Nvidia chips have limited China’s access to top-tier hardware, but analysts say this has driven innovation rather than hindered it. Chinese researchers have

been forced to optimise, relying on techniques such as model distillation to shrink large systems without major performance losses.

This resource-driven creativity has allowed Chinese developers to release highly efficient models that perform strongly on consumer hardware, widening their global adoption. Several leading Chinese labs have also moved aggressively into video generation, an area expected to dominate AI investment in the coming years.

Influence and ideology embedded in open models

China’s dominance in open models carries geopolitical implications. Researchers studying these systems have identified clear political biases aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese models tend to avoid generating sensitive content related to Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square or Taiwan, and their factual outputs often mirror official narratives. As these models spread globally, they shape information flows far beyond China’s borders.

US companies double down on closed systems

Meanwhile, American companies are pouring resources into frontier AI projects, racing to build systems capable of what they describe as “superintelligence.” Meta, once the leading champion of open-weight models through its Llama series, has begun shifting toward more closed systems as it competes with OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI has taken small steps toward openness with limited “open weight” releases, but these fall far short of full transparency.

Only a handful of American organisations — most notably the Allen Institute for AI, which released the fully open-source Olmo 3 model — continue to champion openness.

A widening gap with global consequences

Analysts warn that China’s rapid ascent in the open-model landscape should concern US policymakers. If open systems become the default infrastructure for AI innovation worldwide, the country that shapes them will have disproportionate influence over the future of software, research and global information ecosystems.

The US remains a leader in frontier AI research, but China now dominates the layer of the industry where global adoption happens at scale. The question facing Washington is whether it can—or will—pivot before China consolidates its lead.