Trends

Chinese labs take the lead in open-weight models

Open-weight models · Since Jun 19

Organizations

AlibabaMoonshot AIZhipuAnt GroupAnthropicBaidu

Updates

  1. Sep 25

    Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 topped the open-weight intelligence index under MIT and shipped with 7,000+ RL environments and a public six-day training run.

    Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6

  2. Aug 21

    Qwen3.8-27B scored 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, tying hosted GPT-5.6 Luna from a roughly 17GB file on one consumer GPU, and GLM-5.3 tied Kimi K3 at 60 as the top open model; Ornith-1.5's claimed Opus 4.8 parity is still vendor-reported.

    Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B ties GPT-5.6 LunaZ.ai's GLM-5.3 tops open models, weights delayedOrnith AI's Ornith-1.5 open-weight family

  3. Aug 14

    Alibaba shipped the promised Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, its first Max-class open weights, and DeepSeek took V4-Pro to general availability at about $0.435/$0.87 per 1M tokens, roughly 46x cheaper than Claude Fable 5.

    Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B open weightsDeepSeek V4-Pro reaches general availability

  4. Aug 7

    Alibaba took the 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max to general availability at $2/$6 per 1M tokens and committed to its first Max-class open weights, and MiniMax H3 became the first open-weight model to rank first in an Artificial Analysis category.

    Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max reaches general availabilityMiniMax H3

  5. Jul 31

    Moonshot released full weights for the 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 with its training and serving stack and Ant offered Ling-3.0-Flash free ahead of open weights, while US officials reportedly weighed barring US companies from Chinese open-weight models, a ban Dario Amodei said Anthropic never sought.

    Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3 open weightsAnt Group's Ling-3.0-FlashUS weighs curbs on Chinese open-weight models

  6. Jul 17

    Moonshot's Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter MoE and the largest open-weight model yet, placed just behind GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 on Artificial Analysis and first on BrowseComp (91.2) at $3/$15 per million tokens, with weights still to be released.

    Moonshot AI's Kimi K3

  7. Jun 26

    Alibaba open-sourced Qwen-AgentWorld world models (35B-A3B and 397B-A17B) as simulators for agentic RL, and Baidu's open-weight Unlimited OCR holds the KV cache constant to read dozens of pages in one pass; ByteDance kept its GPT-5.5-tier Doubao Seed 2.1 closed.

    Alibaba's Qwen-AgentWorld world modelsBaidu's Unlimited OCR Works

    Against ByteDance's Doubao Seed 2.1

  8. Jun 19New

    Z.ai's MIT-licensed GLM-5.2 (753B MoE, 1M context) scored 62.1 on SWE-bench Pro against GPT-5.5's 58.6, and Weibo's VibeThinker-3B scored 94.3 on AIME 2026, matching far larger flagships at 3B parameters.

    Z.ai's GLM-5.2Weibo AI's VibeThinker-3B

Predictions

  1. Dec 2026

    At least one Western enterprise constrained by the Fable 5 shutdown standardizes on a self-hosted Chinese open-weight model for coding, even as data-residency scrutiny of Chinese-hosted APIs intensifies. Jun 19

  2. Dec 2026

    Agent-environment simulation and per-token economics, not single-turn reasoning scores, become the Chinese-lab battleground, and more Western enterprises pilot Chinese models through open weights or low-cost APIs for cost-sensitive agentic workloads. Jun 26

  3. Jan 2027

    Once K3's weights land and independent evaluations confirm the numbers, closed labs face sharper pressure to justify premium pricing on capability alone, and more Western enterprises pilot self-hosted Chinese open weights for cost-sensitive agentic workloads. Jul 17

  4. Jan 2027

    The policy fight shifts from whether Chinese open-weight models exist to whether US firms may host or use them, and closed labs keep answering on price, as with the GPT-5.6 Luna and Terra cuts and Opus 5 at half Fable 5's price, rather than on raw capability alone. Jul 31

  5. Feb 2027

    Closed labs keep competing on price and access, as with free GPT-5.6 Luna and cheaper coding agents, rather than raw capability, and more Western teams pilot self-hosted Chinese weights for cost-sensitive agentic work. Aug 7

  6. Feb 2027

    Closed labs keep answering on price and speed rather than raw capability, and more Western teams pilot self-hosted Chinese weights for cost-sensitive agentic work. Aug 14

  7. Feb 2027

    Independent benchmarking, not vendor tables, becomes the gating credibility step for open releases, and more cost-sensitive agentic workloads shift to self-hosted or routed open weights. Aug 21

  8. Mar 2027

    Reproducible RL infrastructure becomes the open-weight battleground, with DeepSeek V4.1-Pro and Qwen 4 the next tests of the pattern. Sep 25