What’s next for Chinese open-source AI

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/12/1132811/whats-next-for-chinese-open-source-ai/

Publish Date: 2026-02-12 05:00:00

DeepSeek’s breakout moment wasn’t China’s first open-source success. Alibaba’s Qwen Lab had been releasing open-weight models for years. By September 2024, well before DeepSeek’s V3 launch, Alibaba was saying that global downloads had exceeded 600 million. On Hugging Face, Qwen accounted for more than 30% of all model downloads in 2024. Other institutions, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and the AI firm Baichuan, were also releasing open models as early as 2023.

But since the success of DeepSeek, the field has widened rapidly. Companies such as Z.ai (formerly Zhipu), MiniMax, Tencent, and a growing number of smaller labs have released models that are competitive on reasoning, coding, and agent-style tasks. The growing number of capable models has sped up progress. Capabilities that once took months to make it to the open-source world now emerge within weeks, even days.

“Chinese AI firms have seen real gains from the open-source playbook,” says Liu Zhiyuan, a professor of computer science at Tsinghua University and chief scientist at the AI startup ModelBest. “By releasing strong research, they build reputation and gain free publicity.”

Beyond commercial incentives, Liu says, open source has taken on cultural and strategic weight. “In the Chinese programmer community, open source has become politically correct,” he says, framing it as a response to US.dominance in proprietary AI systems.

That shift is also reflected at the institutional level. Universities including Tsinghua have begun encouraging AI development and open-source contributions, while policymakers have moved to formalize those incentives. In August, China’s State Council released a draft policy encouraging universities to reward open-source work, proposing that students’ contributions on platforms such as GitHub or Gitee could eventually be counted toward academic credit.

With growing momentum and a reinforcing feedback loop, China’s…

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