China's domestically developed open-source large language models have recorded more than 10 billion cumulative downloads worldwide, and the country now holds the world's largest number of AI-related patents, accounting for around 60% of global patent filings in the field.

The number of AI companies in the country has exceeded 6,200, while the core AI industry was valued at more than 1.2 trillion yuan ($165 billion) in 2025.

Recently, several Chinese technology firms have accelerated upgrades to their open-source AI models. Last week, DeepSeek released its next-generation V4 model, while Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi and Tencent's Hunyuan were also updated.

The latest round of model development has focused on lowering computing costs, expanding industrial-scale applications, improving specialized capabilities and adapting models for use on edge devices.

With continued advances in core technologies, Chinese open-source models have become an increasingly important source of supply and growth within the global open-source AI ecosystem.

A report released by Hugging Face, the world's largest open-source AI platform, said 41% of large language model downloads on its platform over the past year came from models developed in China. It said China has become one of the most active and fastest-growing regions for open-source model development.

Open-source models allow businesses, startups and independent programmers to build customized applications on top of existing models, reducing the need to create AI systems from scratch and lowering both development costs and barriers to adoption.

Previously, advanced models were largely controlled by a small number of closed platforms, and companies mainly had to purchase access to capabilities, according to Zhong Xinlong, a researcher at the China Center for Information Industry Development. "As open-source models mature, companies can carry out secondary development based on their own data, business processes and industry expertise, creating AI applications that are better suited to practical use cases," Zhong noted.

The open development approach is helping expand AI adoption across industries, moving domestic models beyond chatbot-style interaction toward practical productivity tools used in manufacturing, energy, transportation, finance and other sectors of the real economy.