China’s AI Companies Are Going Closed Source

We explain why

China’s AI Companies Are Going Closed Source We explain why Jordan Schneider and Nick Corvino Apr 09, 2026 71 7 3 Share Last week, two of China’s leading labs announced they were pushing closed frontier models. Alibaba’s Qwen team launched Qwen3.6-Plus and Qwen3.5-Omni as hosted offerings on Alibaba Cloud. Z.ai recently announced that GLM-5-Turbo is being rolled out as a closed-source model. Globally competitive video models like ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Kuaishou’s Kling 3.0 are both proprietary. 1 Why? Because teams training Chinese AI models need to make money. Open source AI in China di

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