China has found a new frontier in the U.S. San Francisco-based Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer at Mozilla, which runs the Firefox br... HONG KONG (AP) — China has a hot new product in the United States: artificial intelligence.
“It just seems snappier,” he said of K3, comparing it to the acclaimed and more expensive Claude Fable chatbot from San Francisco company Anthropic. Earlier, he had been using another high-performing Chinese model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, for routine tasks such as managing his calendar, documents and email. Krikorian is one of a growing number of Americans adopting Chinese AI systems, which are gaining ground around the world because they are more affordable and increasingly efficient.
companies like cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said they’re switching to Chinese AI models to help trim costs. Their popularity has frustrated some U.S. tech giants, but short of an outright ban, they’re likely to continue to appeal to independent software developers in the U.S.
American-led restrictions block China from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technologies including cutting-edge AI chips and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned more sanctions could be coming to protect American intellectual property. President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday accused Moonshot of using “covert” but not necessarily illegal methods to build K3 off the back of Anthropic’s Fable.
politicians and AI companies including Anthropic have accused Chinese startups of illicit “distillation” of their models to extract their technologies, a claim that Beijing rejects as “groundless.” China’s AI models are cheaper and ‘good enough’ The rapid rise of cutting-edge Chinese AI models this year shows the China-U.S. race in AI has moved on from early last year, when Chinese startup DeepSeek shook up the U.S. technology industry and put China on the map with an AI model that performed on par with those in the U.S.
The latest AI models launched by startups Z.ai, or Zhipu, in June, and Moonshot in July are nearly as intelligent as the frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, experts say. Also in July, China’s Alibaba previewed its Qwen3.8 Max AI model.
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