China's leading AI labs, 2026: two open-weight anchors, seven platform giants, six specialist independents

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Main Chinese AI Lab players and key facts about them

Fifteen labs, one row each, current to 6 September 2026 — ownership, flagship model family, modalities, open-vs-proprietary access, latest milestone, and funding or corporate status. DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen are the global open-weight reference points; ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, Xiaomi, SenseTime and Kuaishou pair models with distribution and cloud ecosystems; and six independents differentiate through agents, long context, video, healthcare or enterprise work. Valuations for private companies are estimates and are marked as such.

open source / open weights mixed access proprietary API not stated in the row bar length = source mentions in the scan (breadth, not quality)

DeepSeek's V4-Pro pairs a 1.6T-total / 49B-active MoE with a 1M-token context, and US adopters include Lindy (400,000+ professionals) and Siemens — at a valuation of roughly $74B. intl.cloud.tencent.com

Alibaba plans to raise HKD 80B for full-stack AI after cloud and AI revenue rose 45% in a quarter; Airbnb runs Qwen models in customer support. github.com

The independents are heading to market: Zhipu AI cleared the Hong Kong exchange's first-ever listing review for a Chinese AI firm, MiniMax won IPO approval, and Moonshot AI began listing preparations — while MiniMax's prospectus shows a $512M loss on $53M of nine-month revenue. archynewsy.com

01.AI abandoned foundation-model training in April 2026 and pivoted to Decision AI, with revenue up 300% quarter-over-quarter from a tiny base — it is no longer a frontier base-model contender. ainchina.com

Profiles

Evidence table

Click a header to sort. Mention counts describe scan breadth only, never quality.

Method: industry landscape of 15 Chinese AI labs and platform players, one row per organization, compiled from official model sites/repos and independent business and technology coverage, current to 2026-09-06. Facts drawn from 12 primary-source hosts and 8 business-source hosts; no primary URL backs more than 2 rows and no business URL more than 6. Mention counts measure breadth of the scan, not quality. Private-company valuations marked "estimated" are estimates; Baidu's $99B market cap (May 2018) and 76% search share (2015) are historical, not current. Long technical and market facts were shortened in cards for space; the table keeps flagship, access, modalities, founding and milestone fields.

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