September 21, 2026
Open weights from China are running out: labs promise to release their next models under license
Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis says Chinese labs warned services running their models that they will offer the next one under a license rather than as open weights. Developer Dax Raad replied on 21.09.2026 that these labs have released closed models before, while choosing between revenue now and market share later.
dax
@thdxr
everyone piled onto this, but there was a period when the labs themselves did not really know what to do a couple of releases came out closed, and some were annoyed that they could not make revenue from them two views simply collided: the short horizon versus the long one
Dylan Patel (@dylan522p) of @SemiAnalysis_ says open source is dying: "There's multiple Chinese model labs who are telling all the inference guys, 'Our next model's not going to be open source. We're going to license it to you.'" " Open is dying quickly, unfortunately."
· 64.2K views
Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis says Chinese labs warned services running their models that they will offer the next one under a license rather than as open weights. Developer Dax Raad replied on 21.09.2026 that these labs have released closed models before, while choosing between revenue now and market share later.
The next major Chinese release will show which it is: weights available openly or a licensing agreement.
Source
