China Just Released Two AI Models That Claim to Rival OpenAI and Anthropic. And They're Free.
The companies say their models can rival leading U.S. systems while remaining free for developers to download, modify and build on.
- Last week, Moonshot released Kimi K3, and Alibaba followed with Qwen 3.8 on Monday. Both firms are releasing powerful, open-weight models publicly for free.
- Chinese tech giants are shifting toward open-source strategies to bypass the restrictive, closed-source approaches common among Western firms like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, alleged that Moonshot "distilled Anthropic's Fable" for its K3 model, calling it "stealing proprietary US technology."
- Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US might impose sanctions on Chinese AI companies, while AI adviser to President Donald Trump David Sacks called the models' performance "concerning."
- Third-Party benchmarks show these new models perform nearly as well as top Western systems while being optimized for agentic coding tasks, a key technology trend this year.
12 Articles
12 Articles
How a Chinese AI model put Big Tech on notice
What had been a smoldering issue within the tech world burst into plain view this week after Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup, unveiled an AI model with the technical prowess of many American ones — but which can be accessed at a fraction of the cost.
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German company Siemens announced at the VivaTech event held in Paris last month that it is “using a mix of various artificial intelligence (AI) models from the U.S., Europe, and China.” This measure, which involves appropriately combining expensive, high-performance AI with so-called “cost-effective” AI, aims to reduce soaring AI costs and avoid dependence on specific companies or AI models. In fact, Siemens is using models from OpenAI and Antro…
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