The new AI threats from China

A flurry of impressive new artificial intelligence models is coming online in China. DeepSeek grabbed the world’s attention in January with its powerful and allegedly low-cost R1 model, then Alibaba followed it up with a new model called Qwen 2.5-Max, before Tencent released the model Hunyuan Turbo S that it claimed was faster than DeepSeek.

But there’s even more competition now. On Saturday, Baidu announced two new versions of its AI model, Ernie, that are adept at more complex “reasoning” tasks, a major point of emphasis right now for the top American AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. And a Chinese newcomer called Manus recently launched an AI “agent” that can complete multi-step tasks for users — say, order and pay for a pizza — that’s receiving lots of hype though it’s currently invite-only.

The dam has burst in the Chinese tech industry and now every player is racing to release software that can beat DeepSeek but can also compete with the top AI countries in the world.