The AI price war has begun

The battle is not over who builds the cleverest model but who can turn cheaper intelligence into durable cash flow

THE debate over open and closed artificial intelligence models is often dressed up as a philosophical contest. In reality, it is becoming a price war.

Chinese developers, such as DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi, are releasing increasingly capable open-weight models at a fraction of the cost charged by American frontier laboratories.

“Open-weight” means users can download the trained parameters and modify them, subject to licensing terms. It does not imply access to the training code, detailed data information or complete recipe.