The best Chinese LLMs offer
- frontier performance on some benchmarks;
- massive per-token discounts (~3x on input, ~6x on output);
- the weights. On-prem with fully free ~MIT licence, self-hosting, white-box access, customisation, with zero markup (and in fact zero revenue going to the Chinese companies);
- with a bit of work you can get much faster token speeds than the closed APIs;
- less overrefusal (except on CCP talking points);
- on topics controversial in the West, less nannying.
- they just added the search agents that make daily use actually worthwhile;
- They’re the most-downloaded open models.
As a result, going off private information, open-model fan Nathan Lambert says “Chinese open models have become a de facto standard among startups in the US”. Among the few Westerners to stick their necks out and admit it is Airbnb (Qwen). Windsurf’s planner is probably GLM; Cursor’s planner may be DeepSeek.
And yet
- outside China, they are mostly not used, even by the cognoscenti. All Chinese models combined are currently at 19% on the highly selected group of people who use OpenRouter. Over 2025 they trended downwards there. And in the browser and mobile they’re probably <<10% of global use;
- they are severely compute-constrained (and as of November 2025 their algorithmic advantage is unclear), so this implies they actually can’t have matched American models;
- they’re aggressively quantizing at inference-time, 32 bits to 4;
- state-sponsored Chinese hackers used closed American models for incredibly sensitive operations, giving the Americans a full whitebox log of the attack!
What gives?
“Tigers”?
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