A US congressional advisory body has warned that China’s dominance of open-source AI is challenging America’s lead in the tech race, despite restrictions on Chinese access to advanced AI chips. According to Reuters, China’s large language models (LLMs) are already surpassing app downloads such as ChatGPT and Claude in app stores, and Reuters even estimates that around 80% of US tech startups are now using Chinese open-source AI models.
Meanwhile, Alibaba’s chairman Joe Tsai said during a recent digital conference that AI agents—referring to technology such as OpenClaw—will be the future of the white-collar economy. Chinese companies are all racing to develop their own AI agents following the recent “raising lobsters” craze, referring to a rush among young and tech-savvy Chinese to install and train the OpenClaw app to act as a virtual personal assistant. Tencent is the latest company, having just announced the rollout of a ClawBot plugin to its app WeChat, allowing users to perform all kinds of tasks through simple text-based prompts in a WeChat message.
AI is clearly fundamental to the future, and China is right up there in terms of development of new technology. It appears as though one of the advantages that China has is the open-source nature of its LLMs, as while you can control the sale of semiconductors, AI code moves instantaneously, and therefore cannot be restricted. Chinese leadership has made it an absolute priority for China be a technological powerhouse, and therefore is sparing no effort. One of the advantages the Chinese system does have, is the ability to have a fully coordinated approach.