It may seem like China can’t afford to do this anymore, but giving it up could be more costly.
The strategy has been central to the nation’s AI rise. Labs publish weights (the numerical parameters that capture what a model has learned), letting others iterate, learn and distill them into new products. That has helped drive the frantic pace of innovation and spread it across the economy. Beijing has noticed, and open source now has the government’s blessing, becoming central to its tech ambitions.
Even before AI, open source was integral in China’s tech culture that famously refuses to pay for software. Code repository GitHub remains one of the few major Western sites still accessible behind the Great Firewall. As a former GitHub worker argues, this openness is the talent pipeline, and one reason China produces roughly half of the world’s AI researchers.
Open models still tend to trail proprietary ones by about six months. But this gap has stayed surprisingly narrow. And it raises an uncomfortable question for companies like OpenAI: How do you justify a US$852 billion valuation when Chinese rivals are giving away technology that is nearly as good?
It’s causing consternation in Washington. An advisory for US lawmakers last month warned that China “has opted to go all in on an open-source approach to AI”, threatening America’s lead. The report described a powerful flywheel as global uptake of Chinese AI creates a feedback loop that drives iteration and further adoption.
That makes a full-scale abandonment unlikely. Chinese labs may move toward a hybrid model, mixing open and proprietary releases, but they are unlikely to walk away from the strategy altogether.