Opinion | Asia is reaching for the open road that Chinese AI offers

Asia is reaching for the open road that Chinese AI offers

Countries seeking sovereign AI want to control their own AI capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform

At a recent Apec digital technology and AI forum in Chengdu, ministers across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum issued a statement in support of open-source artificial intelligence models – a rare point of agreement in a debate often framed as a zero-sum US-China contest.

Across the region, countries are entering that order along three distinct roads: the flagship national model built directly on a Chinese base, the government pilot that puts Chinese systems into public services, and the private start-up that ships on whatever is most open. China’s rising influence flows from aligning with those goals rather than from any strategy that has outpaced Washington’s.

The economics leave little room for hesitation. Building a frontier model costs billions of dollars and demands rare talent, leaving just China and the United States still training at the frontier. For everyone else, an open Chinese model removes the barrier: the weights are free, they run on local servers without sending data abroad, and they cost 60 to 90 per cent less to operate than the leading American systems while trailing by only months.