ChinaA US commission counted over 100,000 Alibaba Qwen derivative models by March.
A Chinese commentator argues the AI race now turns on cost and deployment, not benchmarks.
Open-weight models can be downloaded, fine-tuned and run privately, while closed models arrive through cloud APIs the vendor controls.
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and IBM publicly backed open-weight models in July, the commentary notes.
The US government and Anthropic accuse Chinese firms of industrial-scale distillation, which Beijing denies.
How each outlet framed it
- TMTPost
- frames open-weights AI as an ecosystem contest, arguing Chinese firms treat models as a funnel for cloud, enterprise deployment and hardware
Sources: TMTPost