On August 4th local time, Bloomberg cited opinions from several analysts, stating that China is producing a large number of new products in the field of artificial intelligence, rapidly narrowing the gap with Silicon Valley. This has created what is called a 'death zone', where any player without cutting-edge technology or breakthrough pricing will face elimination.
American media noted that Alibaba officially launched its most comprehensive and powerful AI framework to date, Qwen 3.8-Max, this week. It has become the latest addition to a series of Chinese products that have ranked at the top of global benchmarks recently. This model appears to be on par with Anthropic’s flagship product, Fable 5, and even outperforms it. Two weeks ago, Kimi K3 from Moon’s Dark Side demonstrated comparable performance despite being priced much lower than similar American products. This has once again raised questions about the effectiveness of U.S. chip sanctions aimed at hindering China’s technological advancement.
Additionally, ByteDance has dominated the video generation field with its Seedance technology. Its version 2.5 has just been released. DeepSeek, a Chinese company that initially challenged the dominance of American artificial intelligence, made a strong return this summer with its V4 Flash technology, offering significant price advantages.
The report indicates that, combined with the GLM-5.2 released by Zhipu in June, this wave of launching five models within eight weeks shows that Chinese developers are approaching, or even surpassing, American pioneers who are typically considered leaders in the AI field. Their core value proposition is not just low price, but also excellent efficiency.
"Once a single shock wave, now it has evolved into an unexpected strong force - (China AI) has not only provided low-cost alternative solutions but also offered high-end capabilities comparable to OpenAI and its US counterparts in the areas of reasoning, programming, and complex tasks."
Chinese technology analyst and founder of the Hello China Tech account, Poe Zhao, told Bloomberg that "the most important change since January 2025 is that China's progress is no longer the result of a single company's breakthroughs."
At first glance, DeepSeek's initial moment seemed like an exception. But recent product releases reveal that China has now built a replicable system capable of producing models that are close to the global forefront.
Independent evaluation agency Artificial Analysis's benchmark tests show that executing complex real-world workloads using DeepSeek V4 Flash costs only $0.03, while using Claude Fable 5 requires $3.15. When China charges in cents while American companies charge in dollars, the competitive landscape between AI clients in both countries begins to change significantly.
Many countries are paying close attention to the competition between China and the United States. They no longer want to choose sides, because the competition has just begun," said George Chen, Chairman of Asian Group Holdings and Head of Digital Business. "The US and China both see AI as a priority for national development. "Because these newly released models, the Chinese side will definitely feel that Mr. Trump's words are true: he has more cards to play."
