China is rapidly closing the gap with the US in artificial intelligence – Bloomberg
China is rapidly closing the technological gap with the US in artificial intelligence, and in terms of cost and usage of AI models, it is already moving ahead. Chinese developers are approaching American leaders in model capabilities, while offering them several times cheaper.
This is evidenced by an analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek, which compared leading American and Chinese models in programming, logical thinking, financial tasks, image generation, and other indicators.
One of the most notable examples was the new Kimi K3 model from China's Moonshot AI. According to independent tests, it has approached the most powerful models of Anthropic and OpenAI, especially in programming and complex tasks for AI agents.
In the ranking of practical programming tasks, OpenAI's model took first place with a result of 89.5%, and Anthropic's best model received 89.1%. Kimi K3 scored 85% and ranked sixth. Another Chinese model - Qwen 3.8 Max from Alibaba - entered the top ten with a result of 81.3%. Thus, two of the top ten positions already belong to Chinese developers.
In this regard, China's main advantage is becoming price. Moonshot charges about $15 per million output tokens for Kimi K3, while using the advanced Anthropic Fable 5 model costs $50. DeepSeek offers its V4-Pro at approximately $3.96 per million tokens during peak hours and even cheaper at other times.
Low prices are already changing the structure of AI usage. According to OpenRouter, Chinese models for the first time surpassed American models in global usage on the platform in June, and in July they accounted for over 60% of used tokens. Meanwhile, on Hugging Face Chinese developments account for 41.4% of downloads of generative models - about 5 percentage points more than American ones.
Chinese models are also beginning to be used by large American companies. Among them Bloomberg names Airbnb, DoorDash and Coinbase. Alibaba reported in August that its open AI models were downloaded more than 3 billion times over six months.
China's rapid progress is happening despite years of American restrictions on the supply of advanced chips and equipment for their production. According to experts, the US still holds a significant advantage in computing power, but Chinese laboratories are compensating for part of this gap with cheaper resources, open models, and aggressive pricing.
Such competition is becoming increasingly sensitive for American OpenAI and Anthropic. Their valuations are approaching $1 trillion and are largely based on the expectation of technological advantage and future profits. At the same time, Chinese competitors are demonstrating that technology close in level can be offered much cheaper.
However, the US still maintains a noticeable advantage among mass users: ChatGPT remains significantly more popular than Chinese AI apps in terms of downloads outside of China.
Based on materials from: Bloomberg
