Just last week the Chinese firm Moonshot AI released its latest open-weight model, Kimi K2.5, which came close to top proprietary systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Opus on some early benchmarks. The difference: K2.5 is roughly one-seventh Opus’s price.
On Hugging Face, Alibaba’s Qwen family—after ranking as the most downloaded model series in 2025 and 2026—has overtaken Meta’s Llama models in cumulative downloads. And a recent MIT study found that Chinese open-source models have surpassed US models in total downloads. For developers and builders worldwide, access to near-frontier AI capabilities has never been this broad or this affordable.
But these models differ in a crucial way from most US models like ChatGPT or Claude, which you pay to access and can’t inspect. The Chinese companies publish their models’ weights—numerical values that get set when a model is trained—so anyone can download, run, study, and modify them.
If these open-source AI models keep getting better, they will not just offer the cheapest options for people who want access to frontier AI capabilities; they will change where innovation happens and who sets the standards.
Here’s what may come next.
China’s commitment to open source will continue
When DeepSeek launched R1, much of the initial shock centered on its origin. Suddenly, a Chinese team had released a reasoning model that could stand alongside the best systems from US labs. But the long tail of DeepSeek’s impact had less to do with nationality than with distribution. R1 was released as an open-weight model under a permissive MIT license, allowing anyone to download, inspect, and deploy it. On top of that, DeepSeek also published a paper detailing its training process and techniques. For developers who access models via an API, DeepSeek also undercut competitors on price, offering access at a fraction the cost of OpenAI’s o1, the leading proprietary reasoning model at the time.
Within days of its release, DeepSeek replaced ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in the US App Store. The moment spilled beyond developer circles into financial markets, triggering a sharp sell-off in US tech stocks that briefly erased roughly $1 trillion in market value. Almost overnight, DeepSeek went from a little-known spin-off team backed by a quantitative hedge fund to the most visible symbol of China’s push for open-source AI.
China’s decision to lean into open source isn’t surprising. It has the world’s second-largest concentration of AI talent after the US. plus a vast, well-resourced tech industry. After ChatGPT broke into the mainstream, China’s AI sector went through a reckoning—and emerged determined to catch up. Pursuing an open-source strategy was seen as the fastest way to close the gap by rallying developers, spreading adoption, and setting standards.