South China Morning Post
Chinese AI developers are considering charging commercial licensing fees for their open-weight models to capture revenue from global cloud platforms. Currently, these models are widely used for free, but developers are looking to monetize their growing popularity among international enterprises.
Why it matters
This shift could disrupt the open-source AI ecosystem and change the cost structure for global companies relying on Chinese-developed AI infrastructure.
Chinese artificial intelligence developers could start charging cloud platforms commercial licensing fees to host their open-weight models, according to the head of Asia internet research at Goldman Sachs, as firms look to capture more revenue from their soaring global use.
The assessment comes as Chinese AI models – such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 – have reached performance levels just a fraction behind top US rivals.
However, because Chinese developers typically release their models under open-source terms, foreign platforms and developers can freely download, modify and host the software’s core “weights” – the underlying parameters that encode their intelligence.
Ronald Keung, Hong Kong-based analyst at the US investment bank, said Chinese model builders could generate more revenue by requiring third-party providers to buy commercial licences to serve these models – a process known as inference – on their own infrastructure.
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