Ben Dubow
U.S. AI models still control over 70 percent of the market, but a collaborative, open source approach has enabled Chinese labs to punch far above their weight. For the second time in six months, a small Chinese artificial intelligence lab has made major waves across the global landscape.
Moonshot AI, with just a few hundred employees, recently released its K2 model to remarkable acclaim. On OpenRouter, a platform that tracks which AI models developers actually pay to use, K2 quickly surpassed offerings from well-funded U.S. competitors including xAI and Meta.
This achievement mirrors the success of DeepSeek, another Chinese AI model that made headlines earlier this year. Both share a crucial characteristic: they are open source, meaning their underlying code and architecture are freely available for anyone to examine,
modify, and build upon. Among big labs in the United States, only Meta has followed suit. But with the social media giant’s latest model widely considered a flop, China is now the undisputed leader in open source AI development.
To understand why this matters requires clarifying what “open source” means in the context of AI. Open source AI models are free to download but, unlike most open source software, they come with significant operational expenses.
When DeepSeek offered free access to consumers, many confused this promotional strategy with the inherent nature of open source models. In reality, all base models require significant computing power, whether it’s paid for by the hosting company – as in the case of consumer products or APIs – or the user.
For everyday consumers, the distinction between open-source and closed is invisible. Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT offer free basic access. Despite the enthusiasm around DeepSeek’s launch, ChatGPT still commands six times as many users globally. The same ranking that showed Moonshot surpassing xAI and Meta has Anthropic and Google alone with majority market share.
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