China’s open AI models are in a dead heat with the West – here’s what happens next

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Chinese AI models have caught up to US models in power and performance.
• China is leading in model openness.
• Much of the world may adopt the freely available Chinese technology.

The US artificial intelligence startup OpenAI began with a mission of transparency in AI, a mission it abandoned in 2022 as the company began to withhold details of its technology. 

In the breach, Chinese companies and institutions have taken the lead. 

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“Leadership in AI now depends not only on proprietary systems but on the reach, adoption, and normative influence of open-weight models worldwide,” wrote lead author Caroline Meinhardt, a policy research manager at Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI institute, HAI, in a report released last week, “Beyond DeepSeek: China’s Diverse Open-Weight AI Ecosystem and its Policy Implications.”

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

“Today, Chinese-made open-weight models are unavoidable in the global competitive AI landscape,” said Meinhardt and collaborators.

The report shows that Chinese large language models (LLMs), such as Alibaba’s Qwen family of models, are in a statistical dead heat with Anthropic’s Claude large language family, another US startup, and within spitting distance of OpenAI and Google’s best models. 

Also: As Meta fades in open-source AI, Nvidia senses its chance to lead

Looking more broadly, the growing prowess of Qwen and DeepSeek and other Chinese models is fueling a “global diffusion” movement, wrote the HAI scholars: Countries around the world, but especially developing-world nations, are going to take up Chinese models as an inexpensive alternative to trying to build their own AI from scratch.

The acceleration comes as the prior leader in open-source AI, Meta Platforms, has slipped in the AI rankings and now appears to be moving more toward the closed-source approach of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. 

As a result, “The widespread global adoption of Chinese open-weight models may reshape global technology access and reliance patterns, and impact AI governance, safety, and competition,” according to HAI.

A technological Great Leap Forward

The shot heard around the world with DeepSeek AI’s R1 large language model early this year, by dint of its low cost of development, has now turned into a growing technology powerhouse from Alibaba and Asian startup firms, including Singapore-based Moonshot AI, creators of Kimi K2, and China’s Z.ai, creators of GLM, noted Meinhardt and team.

Also: What is DeepSeek AI? Is it safe? Here’s everything you need to know

China’s AI labs have labored under a US export ban that restricts the country’s access to the most cutting-edge technology from the US, such as Nvidia’s best GPU chips.

That has created a discipline that has led to increased efficiency among Chinese labs, which is now translating into solid technological progress.

“Chinese open-weight models now perform at near-state-of-the-art levels across major benchmarks and leaderboards, spanning general reasoning, coding, and tool use,” wrote lead author Caroline Meinhardt, a policy research manager at HAI, citing data from the popular LMArena site.

And the top 22 Chinese open models are all better than OpenAI’s own “open-weight” model, GPT-oss, they wrote.

Although benchmarks and ratings have a number of issues, such as potential “gaming” of the scores, the authors note that other indices, such as the Epoch Capabilities Index and the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, “show Chinese models catching up with their US and other international counterparts.”

There’s another measure by which Qwen and the rest are gaining: their uploads of code to the HuggingFace code hosting platform. 

“In September 2025, Chinese fine-tuned or derivative models made up 63% of all new fine-tuned or derivative models released on Hugging Face,” the authors wrote. “Combined with anecdotal stories about adoption, these data points suggest a wide variety of contexts and geographies where Chinese models have been adopted.” 

Also: DeepSeek may be about to shake up the AI world again – what we know

Also in September, “Alibaba’s Qwen model family surpassed [Meta’s] Llama to become the most downloaded LLM family on Hugging Face.”

By those measures, “Chinese open models now appear to be pulling ahead of their US counterparts when it comes to their downstream reach,” they wrote.

More openness from China

Not only increasing technical proficiency but also greater “openness” is fueling China’s rise.

What constitutes an “open” AI model can vary depending on several factors. Traditionally, Meta and others only offered the “weights” of their trained AI models, such as Meta’s Llama family of models. They did not disclose nor post the terabytes of training data they used. Such models are deemed “open-weight” models, but not truly open-source.

Data availability is important because it enables developers to effectively employ AI models and increases the trustworthiness of their output.  

Also: Alibaba’s Qwen AI chatbot boasts 10 million downloads in its first week – here’s what it offers

While data disclosure is still relatively rare, noted HAI, Chinese firms, after initial reluctance, are offering increasingly more permissive licenses for their open-weight models.

“Qwen3 and DeepSeek R1 are both more capable and were released with more permissive licenses (Apache 2.0 and MIT License), allowing broad use, modification, and redistribution,” they wrote. 

They noted that the CEO of Chinese search engine Baidu, which produces the Ernie family of models, was once “among the strongest voices in China to laud the advantages of proprietary models,” but has since “made a U-turn in June 2025” by releasing the weights.

A global diffusion

As a result of their technical proficiency and greater openness, Chinese models are increasingly becoming a way for developers around the world to access free code and create efficient, tunable models for various purposes.

“Distillation” refers to the process of taking an existing AI model and using it to build a smaller, more efficient model. A developer effectively leverages the large budget invested by Alibaba or another prominent developer by endowing the smaller model with the capabilities that were trained in the larger model. 

That distillation is now leading to “diffusion” of Chinese AI, the authors wrote.

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“The wide availability of high-performing Chinese AI models opens new pathways for organizations and individuals in less computationally resourced parts of the world to access advanced AI,” wrote Meinhardt and team, “thereby shaping global AI diffusion and cross-border technological reliance patterns.”

The authors predict the diffusion trend will sustain itself because the economic benefits outweigh continued benchmark achievements by OpenAI and the other closed frontier AI models.

“With model performance converging at the frontier, AI adopters with limited resources to build advanced models themselves, especially in low- and middle-income countries, may prioritize affordable and dependable access to enable industrial upgrading and other productivity gains,” they wrote.

And it’s not just the developing world. “US companies, ranging from established large tech companies to some of the most hyped AI startups, are widely adopting Chinese open-weight models,” they observed. “The existence of open-weight Chinese models at the good-enough level may thus decrease global actors’ reliance on US companies providing models through APIs.”

Plenty of caveats

There are numerous caveats to the increased Chinese preeminence. The open-weight models still may not provide enough transparency to alleviate many concerns about the Chinese government’s involvement in their development. 

While open-weight models can be run on any computer of sufficient power, many users, noted HAI, “will use the apps, APIs, and integrated solutions offered by DeepSeek, Alibaba, and others.”

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As a result, “This typically means user data is under the control of these companies and may physically travel to China, potentially exposing information to legal or extralegal access by the Chinese government or corporate competitors.”

And, they emphasized, it appears that Chinese developers, such as DeepSeek, have fewer concerns about guardrails and other “responsible AI” parameters. “An evaluation by CAISI, the US government’s AI testing center, found that DeepSeek models, on average, were 12 times more susceptible to jailbreaking attacks than comparable US models,” they wrote.

“Other independent evaluations conducted by safety researchers also demonstrate that DeepSeek’s guardrails can easily be bypassed.”

Those concerns mean it is uncharted territory for China’s ultimate influence. However, the report aligns with comments from seasoned observers who view the rise of China and the decline of AI benchmark gains as a sign that the preeminence of US commercial firms is waning.

Also: Is OpenAI doomed? Open-source models may crush it, warns expert

As AI scholar Kai-Fu Lee observed earlier this year, large language models are now commodities, making OpenAI’s business model vulnerable to the economics of open-source AI such as DeepSeek.

More broadly, the report offers compelling evidence that China’s role in global AI will persist, and that the role of the West in governing the technology may be less in the years to come than it was when OpenAI’s ChatGPT dominated the headlines.