China’s open-weight AI models are winning global users. Who is capturing the value?

China’s open-weight artificial intelligence models are taking off globally, but much of the money they generate is flowing to third-party providers rather than the companies that create them, according to a new study.

Developers including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI make their model weights – essentially the “brains” of their AI systems – freely available for download.

This strategy, which has accelerated global adoption over the past two years, allows other companies to run the models on their own...