Chinese artificial intelligence firms are releasing high-performance open-weight models for free, putting pressure on U.S. big tech companies that rely on closed AI platforms. The Verge reported that Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 is seen as matching some top U.S. models at lower cost and is widening the fight to control the developer ecosystem. Analysts say open weights can still generate revenue through infrastructure and services. The trend is also tied to Beijing’s industrial strategy and policy debates in the United States.

Kakao has released four lightweight language models in its Kanana-2 series as open source on global AI platform Hugging Face, targeting on-device use such as smartphones. The company said the models deliver global-level performance in both Korean and English and outperform similar-size open-source models on major benchmarks. Kakao also applied its Korean-specialised tokenizer to boost Korean processing efficiency by more than 30 percent and introduced sliding window attention to cut memory use by up to 72.7 percent in long conversations.