Two of China’s leading AI companies, Moonshot AI and Alibaba, unveiled major new models in July 2026 that they claim rival the best systems from OpenAI and Anthropic — and plan to release them publicly for anyone to download and use.
Beijing-based Moonshot AI moved first, announcing Kimi K3 on Friday. The company says its own testing places Kimi K3 above nearly every U.S. system, behind only OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, while outperforming both on certain benchmarks. Moonshot describes Kimi K3 as the world’s largest open-source AI system, with 2.8 trillion parameters — a measure of model complexity during training. Full model weights are scheduled for public release on July 27th.
Over the weekend, Alibaba followed with a preview of Qwen3.8, a 2.4 trillion parameter model the company calls “one of the most powerful models available today” and “second only to Fable 5.” Alibaba says Qwen3.8 is “continuously evolving” and will go open-weight soon.
A key distinction both companies are highlighting is openness. Rather than keeping their most advanced models proprietary — as OpenAI and Anthropic do — Moonshot and Alibaba are making their systems freely available for developers to download, modify, and build upon. This approach has become a growing point of differentiation for China’s AI industry, though U.S. company Meta has taken a similar open-release path.
Independent verification of the models’ capabilities won’t be possible until they are fully released and tested. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic discloses parameter counts for their leading systems, making direct comparisons difficult.
The releases come as the U.S. government has moved to restrict China’s access to advanced chips through export controls and required Anthropic to pull its most capable model from the market over concerns it could help foreign competitors. The rapid pace of Chinese AI development raises questions about whether the large sums U.S. companies are investing in chips, data centers, and model training can secure a lasting advantage — particularly if Chinese rivals can approach or surpass that frontier with fewer resources.
Source: The Verge