The AI price war has begun

THE debate over open and closed artificial intelligence models is often dressed up as a philosophical contest. In reality, it is becoming a price war.

Chinese developers, such as DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi, are releasing increasingly capable open-weight models at a fraction of the cost charged by American frontier laboratories.

“Open-weight” means users can download the trained parameters and modify them, subject to licensing terms. It does not imply access to the training code, detailed data information or complete recipe.