By mid-2025 China had become a global leader in open-source large language models (LLMs). According to Chinese state media, by July 2025 China accounted for 1,509 of the world’s ~3,755 publicly released LLMs, far more than any other country. This explosion reflects heavy state and industry investment in domestic AI, open licensing (often Apache- or MIT-style), and a strategic pivot by Chinese tech giants and startups toward publicly shared models. The result is a "revival" of open-source AI, with dozens of Chinese LLMs now available for download or use via Hugging Face, GitHub, or cloud APIs. These range from general-purpose foundation models dozens of billions of parameters in size to specialized chatbots and domain experts, many built on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures.
