

To beat China, embrace open-source AI
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.China is making strides in open-source artificial intelligence. Eighty percent of developers worldwide who use open-source AI tools are building with Chinese models, according to an estimate by our colleague Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Research from our firm and OpenRouter shows a significant increase in the use of Chinese open models last year, reaching in some weeks a high of 30% of all AI usage.
In January, Alibaba’s Qwen family surpassed 700 million downloads to become the most widely adopted open-source AI system on the planet.This didn’t happen because China out-engineered the U.S. It happened because U.S. policymakers spent two crucial years treating open-source AI as a threat.After ChatGPT launched in late 2022, a wave of proposals assailed open development as dangerous.
Prominent voices compared open-source AI models to nuclear weapons. Legislators floated broad licensing regimes and restrictions aimed specifically at open releases. California’s SB 1047 would have required open-source developers to monitor and control downstream uses of their models.
That clashes with one of the primary features of open source, namely that anyone can build on it. The message to American developers was clear: Choose open source, and you may face regulatory risk that your proprietary competitors won’t.Predictably, fewer American developers chose open source. And while American open-source development stalled amid regulatory uncertainty, Chinese open models filled the vacuum.This matters both for fostering competition and for creating a healthy, trusted AI ecosystem.
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