All smaller models and models behind frontier are expected to be released by default. Otherwise there’s no reason to produce them.

Chinese labs are not releasing all of their model weights. Qwen is known as an open weight model by most, but their top model is not open weight.

Releasing weights is a marketing strategy for newer labs to get their brand out there.

Xi has made it official policy, see his keynote speech at their World AI Conference last month:

> We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing. [1]

People have pointed that this seemingly made Alibaba/Qwen turn around from closing their models (this was rumored after the shakeup early this year [2]) and release the weights for even the Max variant of their new models, which they previously did not.

1: http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2026-07/18/content_118605...

2: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/4/qwen/

they are playing a completely different game than the US

Well, China is at their usual barely legal (at least if the WTO would be worth even a bit after it got thoroughly gutted) game, just burning their effectively infinite cash reserves to undercut Western providers and eventually force them out of business.

In the end there's barely any moat that any of the ludicrously "valued" AI companies have - the only thing justifying the valuations of SpaceX/xAI/Tesla/Anthropic/OpenAI is a supposed "secret sauce" that, frankly, barely exists any more.

Everyone and their dog can go and run LLMs for dirt cheap on their own hardware.