China turns up the heat with open model blitz as US model makers panic

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The AI arms race reached a fever pitch on Monday after Chinese e-commerce and cloud provider Alibaba called into question America’s technological lead with the launch of Qwen 3.8-Max, a 2.4 trillion-parameter model that goes toe-to-toe with the best models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

The new model comes just days after the launch of DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, which, according to independent benchmarks by Artificial Analysis, performs within a single point of OpenAI’s budget-friendly GPT-5.6 Luna while costing 40 percent less per task. What’s more, at just 284 billion parameters, it’s small enough to run on relatively modest enterprise servers and workstations.

Chinese model devs like Moonshot, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are now attacking their American counterparts on both price and performance. The pincer movement comes as US model devs like Anthropic and OpenAI stoke fears over the origins and safety of China-made AI models.

In a recent blog post, Anthropic...

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