China’s AI ecosystem is not as open as it claims. Nor is any other country’s | Letters
TL;DR
Responding to an article by China’s ambassador to the UK, Prof Paul H Cleverley advocates shared openness standards, while Dr Claire Jenkins says British AI can offer a distinctive path Ambassador Zheng Zeguang rightly celebrates openly released AI models, and the Chinese labs behind Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi have led the way – competition that benefits everyone, especially where models can run on modest hardware in the developing world (The future of AI hinges on openness and cooperation. China and Britain can gain much by working together, 30 July).
Nauti's Take
China's open models give small teams more choice and put real price pressure on the large US vendors, which is a gain on its own. The catch is the label: for these projects, Open Source says little about licensing, training-data disclosure, hosting rules, or geographic restrictions.
Check those per model, and for state-backed projects also verify who controls governance and whether access stays available over time.
Sources