By Emilio Crespo
While the big North American technology companies are fighting for the top positions in the artificial intelligence race, Chinese companies have become queens of the pack and corner a third of the market. According to the OpenRouter platform, its developments, such as the popular DeepSeek and Moonshot, rival those of OpenAI, Meta or Google. They are the kings of low cost AI.
The concept of the Chinese bazaar, of “everything at a hundred”, applied to AI has generated cheap applications for all types of business and individual uses. The most demanded offers from leading brands such as ChatGPT, have less advanced but open source Chinese alternatives capable of offering good results with much lower rates. And the ideological controls that Beijing imposes on these technologies are only noticeable in very specific cases.
Like the products from the Asian country that have flooded global physical and online commerce, these models have been released in record time and at a lower cost than the originals from which they were inspired. The North American company Anthropic last month accused the Chinese commerce and technology giant Alibaba of illegally taking advantage of its AI Claude. The developments of the owners of Aliexpress are not the only ones under suspicion among the increasingly popular Chinese models. The Wall Street Journal claimed last week that these applications are very successful even among companies in California’s Silicon Valley.
Chinese products are also closing the gap with their more advanced Western competitors. GLM-5.2, from the Chinese firm Z.AI, claims to be equal in cybersecurity to Mythos, from Anthropic, so powerful that its use is restricted by the US Government.