Chinese AI companies release open-weight models as a deliberate strategy to gain global influence and market share, since Western institutions won't pay for API subscriptions from Chinese providers over security concerns.
Nathan explains that Chinese labs open-weight their models because US enterprises won't subscribe to Chinese-hosted APIs for security reasons, so distributing free weights is how they buy into the global AI market. ✦ AI generated
Nathan Lambert · Lex Fridman · 2026-01-31 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 6:51
“So some of these models like DeepSeek have the love of the people because they are open-weight. How long do you think the Chinese companies keep releasing open-weight models?”
They're smart and realize the same constraints: a lot of top US tech companies and other IT companies won't pay for an API subscription to Chinese companies for security concerns. This has been a long-standing habit in tech, and the people at these companies then see open weight models as an ability to influence and take part of a huge growing AI expenditure market in the US.
verbatim transcript · starts at 6:51
6:51clear business model for it. I have been writing about open models for a while, and these Chinese companies have realized it. So I get inbound from some of them. And they're smart and realize the same constraints: a lot of top US tech companies and other IT companies won't pay for an API subscription to Chinese companies for security concerns. This has been a long-standing habit in tech, and the people at these companies then see open
7:14weight models as an ability to influence and take part of a huge growing AI expenditure market in the US. And they're very realistic about this, and it's working for them. I think that the government will see that that is building a lot of influence internationally in terms of uptake of the technology, so there's going to be a lot of incentives to keep it going. But building these models and doing the research is very expensive, so at some point, I expect
7:39consolidation. But I don't expect that to be a story of 2026, where there will be more open model builders throughout 2026 than there were in 2025. And a lot of the notable ones will be in China. - You were going to say something? - Yes. You mentioned DeepSeek losing its crown. I do think to some extent, yes, but we also have to consider though, they are still, I would say, slightly ahead. And
8:02the other ones—it's not that DeepSeek got worse, it's just that the other ones are using the ideas from DeepSeek. For example, you mentioned Kimi—same architecture, they're training it. And then again, we have this leapfrogging where they might be at some point in time a bit better because they have the more recent model. And I think this comes back to the fact that there won't be a clear winner. It will just be like that: one person releases
8:25something, the other one comes in, and the most recent model is probably always the best model. - Yeah. We'll also see the Chinese companies have different incentives. Like, DeepSeek is very secretive, whereas some of these startups are like the MiniMaxs and Z.ais of the world. Those two literally have filed IPO paperwork, and they're trying to get Western mindshare and do a lot of outreach there. So I don't know if these incentives will change the
8:49model development, because DeepSeek famously is built by a hedge fund, Highflyer Capital, and we don't know exactly what they use the models for or if they care about this. - They're secretive in terms of communication; they're not secretive in terms of the technical reports that describe how their models work. They're still open on that front. And we should also say, on the Claude Opus 4.5 hype, there's the layer of something