Asia is reaching for the open road that Chinese AI offers

At a recent Apec digital technology and AI forum in Chengdu, ministers across the Asia-pacific-economic-cooperation" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="14437" data-entity-type="organization">Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum issued a statement in support of open-source Artificial Intelligence models – a rare point of agreement in a debate often framed as a zero-sum US-China contest.It pointed towards an AI order that cuts against the assumption of a contest with a single winner, an assumption that still shapes Washington’s alarm over every Chinese AI breakthrough. Across Asia, governments are building their own systems, and most are building on open Chinese models.Because the leading Chinese systems are open weight, free to download and reshape, they are producing an AI order in which no single company or country owns the field. That openness matches what many states pursuing sovereign AI want: a multipolar landscape where they control their own capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform.