china

Z.ai published the 753-billion-parameter GLM-5.3 on Hugging Face two weeks after its API launch, but swapped GLM-5.2's MIT license for one that makes model hosts above $10 billion in revenue pass a Z.ai security review.

Anthropic is heading toward an expected $2 trillion October IPO in the same month a government evaluator documented its model backdooring a real open-source project, and with Moonshot closing a ~$50B round, the market has priced everything except the thing that failed.

In roughly fourteen days, four Chinese labs shipped or previewed near-frontier open-weight models (LongCat-2.0, Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8-Max, GLM-5.2), and because 'open' is a spectrum being gamed, this map grades actual openness, not press-release openness.

On July 17, Xi Jinping used his first WAIC keynote to make open-source AI a matter of Chinese foreign policy, a global public good pitched to the Global South against Washington's gate, and the propaganda reflex misses that the models are real and shipped the same fortnight.

Moonshot AI shipped a 2.8-trillion-parameter model it calls the world's first open 3T-class model while reportedly raising at a $30 billion valuation, and the interesting part is not the parameter count: a startup pitching scarcity promised to give its best asset away.

In five days, an Ant Group affiliate open-sourced an entire robot brain, BAAI shipped a world model that learns robot control without action labels and Mistral entered robotics, moving the physical-AI frontier to open weights with almost none of it from a US lab.

While Washington spent June turning frontier model releases into licensed events, Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter agentic-coding model under an MIT license trained entirely on domestic chips, as the counter-move to the export-control regime.

On June 16, GLM-5.2 became the leading open-weight model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1 at 51, just 3.4 months behind an equally capable closed model, down from a 9.8-month gap in December 2024.

The lab that refused capital is closing a $7.4B first round at up to $59B: why a battery maker leads it, why Tencent's check is defensive, and why founder Liang Wenfeng kept 40%.

Within three weeks MiniMax M3, Qwen3.7-Max, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6 and Nemotron 3 Ultra all claimed the coding frontier, and third-party leaderboards show a real but small gap, mostly self-graded marquee numbers and a jurisdiction risk no benchmark measures.