Chinese AI firms Moonshot and Alibaba have unveiled powerful new models that they claim rival the best systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, intensifying competition with Silicon Valley just as AI becomes central to national security and economic power. Moonshot released Kimi K3 on Friday, claiming it outperforms nearly every US system bar OpenAI's and Anthropic's flagship models, while Alibaba followed over the weekend with a preview of Qwen3.8, describing it as "second only" to Anthropic's leading model. Crucially, both companies are making their systems publicly available rather than keeping them proprietary, a growing point of contrast with most US labs.

Moonshot's Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters, which it calls the world's largest open-source AI system, while Alibaba's Qwen3.8 has 2.4 trillion; full model weights are due for release on 27 July and "soon" respectively, meaning independent verification of the claims is not yet possible. The releases echo the disruption caused by DeepSeek's low-cost model last year and raise questions over whether the huge US investment in chips and data centres guarantees a lasting edge, particularly as Washington simultaneously tightens restrictions on China's access to the underlying technology.