We are used to seeing the names of American companies and products in every news cycle: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI.
These companies make breakthroughs, open new horizons, and push human progress forward. But there is one qualification: their leading flagship models remain largely closed to the public. They are black boxes that provide a service today but can withdraw it, change the access rules, or raise the price tomorrow.
That strategy is understandable from a marketing perspective, but it does not offer the range of applications we could otherwise have.
Open weights instead of a closed service
Help for ordinary developers has arrived from an unexpected direction. China, driven by an enormous desire to claim its place in the AI revolution and by intense internal and external competition, now plays a central role in bringing this technology to “the people.”
Many prominent Chinese models are released with open weights. This is not always full open source: training data, training code, and production infrastructure often remain private. The weights themselves, however, can be downloaded — provided your hardware can handle them.
As a result, Chinese companies increasingly bring powerful models not only to corporations, but also to ordinary developers.
That is excellent news. It moves us away from total concentration of capability in a few hands and toward greater freedom, wider distribution of knowledge, and social development. Paradoxically, this freedom comes not from altruism, but from China’s pragmatic determination not to fall behind the United States.
GLM‑5.1 as an example
GLM‑5.1 is a good example. In engineering and agentic scenarios, it competes directly with GPT, Claude, and other flagship models. Its weights are published under the MIT License, so the model can be downloaded and deployed on your own infrastructure if you have enough compute.
On several engineering benchmarks, GLM‑5.1 sits close to leading closed models and sometimes competes with them directly. It is important to remember that results are not always perfectly comparable and some figures come from the developers themselves. API access is also considerably cheaper than many closed flagships, although any exact comparison depends on the provider, caching, and operating mode.
Most importantly, the model has already been preserved on the internet. It can be used and studied regardless of how the rules of a particular service change. A closed model only offers access to an interface that its owner can alter at any moment.
This is a major contribution from China, and one that should be acknowledged regardless of how you view the country’s politics as a whole.
STRIKE!