September 18, 2026
Chinese AI Developers Still Trail OpenAI and Anthropic: The Whole Market Totals $10,7 Billion
Rhodium Group estimated the combined annual revenue run rate of seven Chinese developers at $10,7 billion (data as of 17 September 2026). That is about 10% of the recently announced combined annual run rate of OpenAI and Anthropic. The estimate includes DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI, as well as four other developers.
After price increases, Chinese frontier models typically cost $0,04–0,50 per task, while the best models cost $0,50–1. Claude costs $2–4, and expensive GPT models cost $1–2 per task. Open weights make monetization harder: a cloud provider can deploy a model and sell an API without paying the developer.
The market pays for expectations. DeepSeek's valuation reaches 163 times annual revenue, Moonshot AI's 50, versus 34 for OpenAI and 21 for Anthropic. Investment in Zhipu AI, MiniMax, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI rose from 9 billion yuan in 2025 to 179 billion in the first eight months of 2026.
**They are looking to the cloud for an exit.** Moonshot AI and Alibaba are pursuing revenue-sharing agreements. Moonshot AI is discussing a share of up to 30% with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Moonshot AI's agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will show whether open weights can be turned into sustainable revenue.
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