Many Chinese companies also introduce products at a faster pace than their American counterparts: Alibaba released a new model roughly every 20 days this year, compared with Anthropic’s 47-day average between releases.

Nathan Lambert, a senior research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI and an expert on the open-model AI ecosystem, told NBC News that Chinese models’ recent progress is no fluke.

“The Chinese are genuine innovators in AI,” Lambert said.

The “balance of power has been shifting rapidly in the last 12 months,” Lambert added. He has written extensively about China’s AI developments on his Substack and is considered an expert on China’s open-source ecosystem.

America’s AI edge

Some in Silicon Valley are quick to point out that American models retain a significant advantage at the cutting edge of AI capabilities, and that these closed American models provide off-the-shelf convenience and ease of use that unwieldy open models cannot match.

Tim Tully, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, said closed models remain significantly more capable and often more useful: “The tooling is just better, the productivity is just better, the agentic frameworks that are built and used by everybody, they’re just better off with Anthropic and OpenAI. They just work better. So the ecosystem is just strong in the closed-sourced environment.”

In addition, many companies may shy away from using Chinese models because of risk — whether actual or imagined — about using a product based on a Chinese foundation.

“There’s a perceived risk that buyers are hesitant to buy a product that’s based on a Chinese open-weight model, either from the private sector or the public sector,” Tully said. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic, one of the world’s leading closed-model companies.

In late September, the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation released a report outlining risks from DeepSeek’s popular models, finding weakened safety protocols and increased pro-Chinese outputs compared to American closed-source models.

A recent White House memo also accused Alibaba, Qwen’s developer, of supporting China’s military, adding a political barrier to enterprise embrace of these AI systems.

In reply, Alibaba told the Financial Times the assertions were “complete nonsense” and “plainly an attempt to manipulate public opinion and malign Alibaba.”

Many observers also note that several Chinese models released over the past year appear to have borrowed heavily from American models. Some observers think DeepSeek’s rapid progress could only have come from copying much of the difficult foundational work of American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

This dynamic raises questions about whether Chinese open models will continue to converge on, let alone eclipse, American closed-model performance. Over the past year, experts have charged that Chinese models may remain highly capable “fast-followers,” reliant on American AI progress.

Chinese firms, meanwhile, are also exploring closed-source models. In October, Alibaba released only a closed-source version of the largest of its new Qwen systems, opting not to share an open-source version.

Who controls the future?

American AI companies and the federal government have noticed the recent rise of Chinese models, and experts have even labeled America’s lack of powerful open-source models an “existential” threat to democracy.

While Meta’s high-profile Llama series of open-source models has historically led American open-source efforts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signaled Meta’s intention not to open-source all of its “superintelligence” AI models. The performance of Llama models has also stalled in recent years, one of the reasons why open-source users have shifted to better-performing Chinese open-source models.

Yet American open-source efforts may be gradually awakening, as American innovators attempt to boost American open-model competitiveness.

In July, the White House released an AI Action Plan that called for the federal government to “Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI.”

In August, ChatGPT maker OpenAI released its first open-source model in five years. Announcing the model’s release, OpenAI cited the importance of American open-source models, writing that “broad access to these capable open-weights models created in the US helps expand democratic AI.”

And in late November, the Seattle-based Allen Institute released its newest open-source model called Olmo 3, designed to help users “build trustworthy features quickly, whether for research, education, or applications,” according to its launch announcement.

Lambert, of the Allen Institute, has also launched the “ATOM Project” — an acronym for “American Truly Open Models.” As the ATOM Project’s manifesto declares: “America has lost its lead in open models — both in performance and adoption — and is on pace to fall further behind.”

“If we want to be the preeminent nation in the AI era, we cannot cede such a critical piece of the ecosystem to any nation,” Lambert told NBC News via email.