China’s open AI advantage may not last forever

Indian startups are rebuilding their products on Chinese foundations. Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi allowed significant cost savings, run almost as well as the American frontier, and lag it by about six months. Nikkei Asia reported in July 2026 that Indian companies are increasingly switching to Chinese large language models (LLMs) to contain Artificial Intelligence (AI) costs, with one venture investor noting that startups are cutting costs by an order of magnitude.

This open-weight generosity is neither charity nor a workaround for chip controls. It is a strategy supported by different independent logics that make it durable. But durable is not permanent. The assessment by these writers is that China will begin graduating access to its frontier open-weight models around late 2028.