If you ask anyone in America or Europe which AI tool is most popular today, they will quickly say ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. But surprisingly, the real answer is something most of us have never heard about. Over the last two weeks, the most used AI model in the world was Kimi K2.6, an open-source Chinese AI model. It reached the top position on OpenRouter, a famous platform that tracks which AI tools people are using the most.
This is a wake-up call. Western leaders and big companies are busy fighting over who has the most powerful AI and the most advanced computer chips. But while they are looking in one direction, China is silently moving in another direction and capturing the actual market.
China's plan is very smart and simple. Instead of making the most expensive or most advanced AI, they are building open-source AI models. Open-source means the software is free and anyone can download, change and use it as per their needs. These Chinese AI models are cheap, good enough for daily work, and easily available to everyone.
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Let us understand with a real example. Kimi K2.6, made by a Chinese company called Moonshot AI, performs almost equal to top models like Claude Opus 4 and GPT-5.5 in performance tests. But the price difference is huge. Kimi costs only around 4 dollars for one million output tokens. Tokens are simply small pieces of words that AI uses to read and write text. The American models are six to eight times more costly. For a normal person, this may not matter much. But imagine a company running hundreds of AI bots daily. The savings become very big and naturally they will choose the cheaper option.
Kimi is not alone. Another Chinese AI called Qwen, made by Alibaba, is also growing very fast. By March, Qwen had captured more than 50 percent of all global downloads of open-source AI models, even crossing Meta's Llama, which is the biggest Western competitor. Qwen has already been downloaded almost 1 billion times worldwide. Even the Singapore government decided last November to build its own national AI system using Qwen instead of Llama. They wanted full control over their AI system, which is a very practical decision.
What China is doing now looks like a new version of its famous Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Earlier, China built ports, roads and railways in many countries to increase its influence. Now they are doing the same thing, but with digital tools. The good part for China is that this digital expansion is almost free for them. The country using the AI pays for servers and electricity. There are no big visible projects, so no protests or political problems also. It is influence without noise.
China's bigger goal is called "Standards 2035". The plan is to make Chinese technology the default choice everywhere. Once businesses start building their systems using Chinese AI, they automatically follow Chinese rules and methods. Slowly, Chinese standards become world standards. China already did this with Logink, its free shipping software, which is now used in 86 ports across 24 countries.
The real battlefield is the Global South, meaning countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Western nations already use American AI, but developing countries are still deciding. Three reasons make Chinese AI more attractive for them. First, American AI is very costly. Second, American models are trained on Western data, so they struggle with local languages and cultures. Chinese open-source AI can be freely adjusted using local data. For example, AfriqueQwen-14B is built on Qwen and trained in 20 African languages. Third, there is rising anger against America in many places, and Washington is treating AI like a security war instead of helping poorer nations with affordable tools.
Some people worry about Chinese censorship, as models like DeepSeek avoid answering questions about Taiwan, Tibet or Tiananmen. But for most developing countries, these topics do not affect their daily work, so they may not see it as a big problem. Also, since open-source AI is downloaded quietly from websites, there are no government deals attracting political attention.
The lesson here is clear. The AI race is not just about who has the strongest chip or the smartest model. It is about whose AI becomes the everyday tool for the world. If Chinese AI quietly becomes the default option across developing nations, Beijing will hold strong global influence for many decades. Western governments need to wake up fast and offer affordable, practical AI solutions, or else this race may be decided before they even realise it has started.
(Girish Linganna is an award-winning science communicator and a Defence, Aerospace & Geopolitical Analyst. He is the Managing Director of ADD Engineering Components India Pvt. Ltd., a subsidiary of ADD Engineering GmbH, Germany.)
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