Shao: Chinese AI Labs Open-Sourced Models to Disarm Global Skepticism
Grace Shao · How China Caught U.S. AI — With Grace Shao · Jul 29, 2026 · at 14:43
Tech analyst Grace Shao explains why Chinese foundation model labs chose an open-source strategy to attract international developers and counter geopolitical mistrust.
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“It's essentially in the beginning, it was like a branding strategy for a lot of these labs. And when I spoke to them, because they said, look, if we want more developers on our ecosystem or on our using our APIs, they need to know what's out there, especially since we are Chinese, frankly. And they're like, if we don't put our R and D, you're going to have a lot of accusations of this and that, but we put our papers, we put out our research, you can be the judge of it. So that was the initial kind of. Starting point of open source and how it got, I think a lot of users, especially startups that might be more cost constraint and less compliance, you know, worried getting on these labs and start getting on these models.”
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