Alibaba's New Model Adds Fuel to China's AI Race

"It reflects the broader competitiveness of China's frontier AI ecosystem," says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That ecosystem includes DeepSeek's R1 and Tencent's Hunyuan model, which Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has said is by some measures "world-class." That said, assessments of Alibaba's latest model are preliminary, both due to the inherent challenge of measuring model capabilities, and because so far, the model has only been assessed by Alibaba itself. "The information environment is not very rich right now," says Singer. Since the release of DeepSeek's R1 model in January sent waves through the global stock market, China's tech ecosystem has been in the spotlight--particularly as the U.S. increasingly sees itself as racing against China to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)--highly advanced AI systems capable of performing most cognitive work, from graphic design to machine-learning research.