Why China Is Suddenly Flooding the Market With Powerful AI Models

The pace of open-source push by Beijing has been relentless.

- June Yoon

Retaliation seemed certain. When the US tightened its grip on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in January — blocking China's access to advanced AI chips and locking proprietary models behind trade barriers — the response appeared predictable. China would build its own walls, guard its breakthroughs and double down on secrecy.

Instead, China is doing something unexpected: it is giving away its most advanced AI models.

In recent weeks, Chinese tech groups, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, have been flooding the market with powerful AI models. But in an industry where secrecy is the norm, the real shock is their openness — these models are free to download, modify and integrate.

The pace of China's open-source AI push has been relentless. Since the debut in January of DeepSeek R1 — China's answer to OpenAI's series — a wave of increasingly capable models has followed. Alibaba claims its latest AI reasoning model QwQ-32B rivals DeepSeek's R1 and has performed well in official benchmark tests. Every few weeks, another arrives, pushing the boundaries of what open-source AI can do.