Chinese AI developers, including Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot, launched a wave of powerful new open-weight models this week, intensifying pressure on American rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. Alibaba released Qwen 3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion-parameter model that rivals top offerings from its US competitors, marking the first time it has made its flagship "Max" model weights publicly downloadable rather than restricting it to a paid API. The release underscores growing concern that China now leads the open-weights AI race, even as US firms increasingly emphasise price, performance and safety concerns around Chinese-made models.

The surge follows DeepSeek's V4 Flash 0731, a 284-billion-parameter model that independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis found performs within a single point of OpenAI's budget GPT-5.6 Luna model while costing 40 percent less to run, and is compact enough for modest enterprise hardware. Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue told CNBC that Chinese firms are "clearly dominating" open models and could lead at the frontier level within a year. By contrast, America's leading open-weights model, Inkling, has under a billion parameters and lags behind Chinese offerings such as Moonshot's Kimi K3 and Z.ai's GLM 5.2, leaving Chinese models as the main open alternative to proprietary Western systems.