Ever wondered where the large AI model you’re running comes from? Chances are, it’s built in China — and you might not even realize it.
Data from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows cumulative worldwide downloads of China’s open-source AI large models passed 10 billion as of last week.
It’s been quite an eventful week for the AI industry. During internal testing of cyberattack capabilities, an OpenAI agent went rogue and breached internal systems on an open-source AI community, sparking an unprecedented cybersecurity incident. After finding domestic closed-source models could not solve their challenges, they turned to China’s Zhipu AI.
China also launched Kimi K3. With 2.8 trillion parameters, it instantly set a new global record for the largest open-source AI model.
OpenRouter data reveals the share of tokens U.S. companies consume by accessing Chinese AI models rocketed from 4.5% to 46% over the past year. Meanwhile, more than 9,200 small and medium-sized businesses across North America, Southeast Asia and Europe signed up for commercial APIs of Chinese large models in just six months.
China’s AI open-source large models surpassed 10 billion cumulative downloads worldwide.
