China’s AI ecosystem is not as open as it claims. Nor is any other country’s | Letters
TL;DR
A Guardian letters exchange pushes back on the claim that China's AI development is fundamentally open. Chinese labs have released capable models such as Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi, several of which run on modest hardware. But GeoGPT, the geoscience system promoted as jointly governed open science, appears to carry conditions and access restrictions behind the open label. The exchange argues that open source in AI needs precise standards for data, models, governance and use.
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