HONG KONG: China has a hot new product in the United States: artificial intelligence.San Francisco-based Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer at Mozilla, which runs the Firefox browser, switched to Chinese AI startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3 for many of his day-to-day activities within days of the new, powerful model’s launch more than a week ago. “It just seems snappier,” he said of K3, comparing it to the acclaimed and more expensive Claude Fable chatbot from San Francisco company Anthropic. Earlier, he had been using another high-performing Chinese model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, for routine tasks such as managing his calendar, documents and email.Krikorian is amongst the growing number of Americans adopting Chinese AI systems, which are gaining ground around the world because they are more affordable and increasingly efficient.
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US companies like cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said they’re switching to Chinese AI models to help trim costs.Their popularity has frustrated some US tech giants, but short of an outright ban, they’re likely to continue to appeal to independent software developers in the US and elsewhere. American-led restrictions block China from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technologies including cutting-edge AI chips and US treasury secretary Scott Bessent has warned more sanctions could be coming to protect American intellectual property.Trump administration on Wednesday accused Moonshot of using “covert” but not necessarily illegal methods to build K3 off the back of Anthropic’s Fable. Some US politicians and AI companies including Anthropic have accused Chinese startups of illicit “distillation” of their models to extract their technologies, a claim that Beijing rejects as “groundless.”The rapid rise of cutting-edge Chinese AI models this year shows the China-US race in AI has moved on from early last year, when Chinese startup DeepSeek shook up the US technology industry and put China on the map with an AI model that performed on par with those in the US but much more cheaply.The latest AI models launched by startups Z.ai, or Zhipu, in June, and Moonshot in July are nearly as intelligent as the frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, experts say. Also in July, China’s Alibaba previewed its Qwen3.8 Max AI model. In April, DeepSeek rolled out previews of its latest V4 model, challenging OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini.Based on data over the past month, the top five most popular models on OpenRouter, a platform that tracks AI models, were Chinese.Estimates from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, showed China’s Kimi had more than 930,000 downloads during the week after K3’s July release, an increase of 200% from the week before. In the US it was downloaded around 86,000 times, a 387% jump. K3 proved so popular that Moonshot had to suspend new subscriptions as demand pushed its capacity close to its limits.