Seven models in three weeks: China's AI labs aren't waiting

Between late January and mid-February, Chinese labs released seven major models in rapid succession. Kimi K2.5, GLM-5, MiniMax M2.5, and Qwen 3.5 all ship with open weights. ByteDance dropped Seedance 2.0 (video), Seed 2.0 (text), and Kling 3.0 (video). Every model costs under $1 per million input tokens. Claude Opus charges $5, GPT-5.2 charges $1.75. The open-weight strategy is paying off: Qwen has 700 million+ downloads and 180,000 derivative models. Alibaba Cloud revenue is up 34% year-over-year. The benchmark gap with Western models is small and shrinking. The price gap is large and growing.

View full digest for February 18, 2026