The dominance of China’s open-source AI is creating a “self-reinforcing competitive advantage”, allowing it to challenge US rivals despite restricted access to advanced AI chips, reports Reuters citing a US congressional advisory body.
Driven by their cheaper cost, Chinese large language models from firms including Alibaba, Moonshot and MiniMax now dominate worldwide usage rankings on platforms like HuggingFace and OpenRouter. Beijing’s push to deploy AI throughout a wide range of sectors to upgrade its manufacturing base, factories, logistics networks and robotics is generating real-world data that feeds back into model improvement, the report said.
As AI’s frontiers shift from large language models towards agentic AI and physical, or embodied, AI, China may be better positioned to capitalise on its mass data collection efforts to boost development of humanoid robots, autonomous driving software or even dual-purpose technologies, the report said.