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Asia is reaching for the open road that Chinese AI offers

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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.

It pointed towards an AI order that cuts against the assumption of a contest with a single winner, an assumption that still shapes Washington’s alarm over every Chinese AI breakthrough. Across Asia, governments are building their own systems, and most are building on open Chinese models.
Because the leading Chinese systems are open weight, free to download and reshape, they are producing an AI order in which no single company or country owns the field. That openness matches what many states pursuing sovereign AI want: a multipolar landscape where they control their own capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform.

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.

The flagship national model

The most visible of the three roads is the flagship national model. Last year, AI Singapore moved from using Meta’s Llama in its Southeast Asian Languages in One Network (SEA-LION) project to running SEA-Lion large-language models on Qwen by Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post. And Kazakhstan’s AlemLLM was developed by Chinese start-up 01.AI on a DeepSeek base, the only option for a country with only a few hundred ageing chips.
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