China’s AI industry is ramping up competition. On Monday, Alibaba unveiled its largest and most capable AI model to date, sending its shares higher. Meanwhile, a research firm said DeepSeek’s latest model offers pricing that is more than 100 times cheaper than Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, underscoring the intensifying race to deliver powerful AI at lower cost.
“They need models that are good enough, affordable, transparent and accessible, and open-weight models help meet that demand,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, as cited by Reuters.
Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google which offer closed-source models, both Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash are open-weighted models. This means the underlying learned settings that allow developers to run or adapt the system are available for download.
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Qwen3.8-Max, which is scheduled for release next week, boasts 2.4 trillion parameters, making it one of the “most powerful” AI models in the Chinese tech giant’s Qwen family of AI models to date, Alibaba said. Parameters refer to the numerical settings that shape how AI processes information and generates responses.
According to CNBC, the model also supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens, which means it can understand and work with thousands of pages of information.
Meanwhile, Artificial Analysis said DeepSeek’s V4-Flash model scored 50 out of 100 on its Intelligence Index, which combines results from nine benchmarks spanning coding, reasoning and workplace-style assignments. V4-Flash charges $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens, according to research firm Artificial Analysis. A token is a unit of data used to measure AI usage.
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Last year, DeepSeek had shaken up the industry with its high performing model that offered serious competition to its Western rivals. However, the company soon saw the rise of domestic rivals, including other startups such as Moonshot, MiniMax and Z.AI as well as tech giants like ByteDance and Alibaba. According to reports, Deepseek is also preparing for a potential IPO.
Last month, another Chinese company, Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model designed for software engineering and autonomous task execution.
Moonshot had highlighted Kimi K3’s performance across coding, reasoning and agent benchmarks. Built on a mixture-of-experts architecture, the company said the model delivers competitive performance while reducing inference costs compared with similarly sized dense models.
While Chinese AI models are gaining traction in the West, U.S. lawmakers are reportedly considering how to curb the growing adoption of Chinese AI models by homegrown companies.