China’s AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies and earning the praise of a growing list of tech leaders, Al Jazeera reports.
Their rapid ascent has highlighted the competitive edge that Chinese developers such as Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax have been able to gain by offering so-called “open” language models at much lower costs than their rivals in the United States.
The trend has also cast a critical glare on the US’s efforts to stunt China’s tech sector with export controls on advanced chips, which have not stopped Chinese developers from approaching the capabilities of Silicon Valley’s tech giants.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky generated headlines in October when he revealed that the short-term rental platform had opted for Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, praising the Chinese model as “fast and cheap”.
Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya revealed the same month that his company had migrated much of its work to Moonshot’s Kimi K2 as it was “way more performant” and “a ton cheaper” than models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Programmers on social media also recently highlighted evidence that two popular US-developed coding assistants, Composer and Windsurf, were built on Chinese models.
The assistants’ developers, Cursor and Cognition AI, have not publicly confirmed their use of Chinese technology and did not respond to requests for comment, though Z.ai has said the speculation aligns with its “internal findings.”
Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher who founded the Atom Project, an initiative to promote open models in the US, said such public examples were the “tip of the iceberg”.
“Chinese open models have become a de facto standard among startups in the US,” Lambert told Al Jazeera.
“I’ve personally heard of many other high-profile cases, where the most valued and hyped American AI startups are starting training models on the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM or DeepSeek,” Lambert said, adding that many US firms have been reluctant to publicly disclose their use of Chinese technology.
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