Cheaper, open and intelligent: Chinese AI models gain ground, as they make inroads in the U.S.

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 with 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….