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Chenjie Song

Minghao Sun

At a recent Apec digital technology and AI forum in Chengdu, ministers across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum issued a statement in support of open-source artificial intelligence models – a rare point of agreement in a debate often framed as a zero-sum US-China contest.
It pointed towards an AI order that cuts against the assumption of a contest with a single winner, an assumption that still shapes Washington’s alarm over every Chinese AI breakthrough. Across Asia, governments are building their own systems, and most are building on open Chinese models.
Because the leading Chinese systems are open weight, free to download and reshape, they are producing an AI order in which no single company or country owns the field. That openness matches what many states pursuing sovereign AI want: a multipolar landscape where they control their own capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform.
Across the region, countries are entering that order along three distinct roads: the flagship national model built directly on a Chinese base, the government pilot that puts Chinese systems into public services, and the private start-up that ships on whatever is most open. China’s rising influence flows from aligning with those goals rather than from any strategy that has outpaced Washington’s.
The economics leave little room for hesitation. Building a frontier model costs billions of dollars and demands rare talent, leaving just China and the United States still training at the frontier. For everyone else, an open Chinese model removes the barrier: the weights are free, they run on local servers without sending data abroad, and they cost 60 to 90 per cent less to operate than the leading American systems while trailing by only months.
The flagship national model
The most visible of the three roads is the flagship national model. Last year, AI Singapore moved from using Meta’s Llama in its Southeast Asian Languages in One Network (SEA-LION) project to running SEA-Lion large-language models on Qwen by Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post. And Kazakhstan’s AlemLLM was developed by Chinese start-up 01.AI on a DeepSeek base, the only option for a country with only a few hundred ageing chips.
A model assembled this way stays tied to its base, yet in an open ecosystem that reliance is shared rather than captive: the weights are owned outright, the code can be adapted freely, and a government that could never train a frontier model alone gets a working system it controls.
The government pilot
A second road runs through the government pilot. In Malaysia, the Prime Minister’s Office and communications ministry were among the first users of a domestic platform running DeepSeek. Vietnam passed a law last December asserting sovereignty over its AI infrastructure, a legal frame the cheapest open foundation will end up filling. Each pilot leaves behind domestic expertise and options no single supplier can revoke.
The private start-up
The third road runs through private developers, and it reaches well beyond the developing world. In Japan, companies such as Abeja and Lightblue build their models on Qwen, which outperform American systems on Japanese-language tasks. In South Korea, where DeepSeek is restricted on security grounds, commercial developers still reach for Qwen because of its permissive licensing.
In Kenya and Nigeria, start-ups build on Chinese models because inference costs can be as much as 90 per cent lower.


What this adds up to is not Chinese domination. As Asia builds on its open models, a shared set of tools and standards spreads, and China gains influence as its most useful contributor.
The US, meanwhile, keeps confirming the fear that drives the shift: being shut out of the technology altogether. In June, the Trump administration ordered Anthropic to cut off foreign access to its most capable models, briefly extending the block to treaty allies alongside adversaries. Each time Washington treats frontier models as capabilities to be licensed and withheld, it validates the anxiety.
Malaysia showed how little unilateral pressure can achieve against an open system. Last year, it walked back its involvement in a platform running DeepSeek on Huawei chips, dropping the hardware claim within a day under US export-control pressure while the model stayed in place. The pattern holds inside Washington’s coalition; the Pax Silica initiative counts Singapore and Kazakhstan among its members.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping urged countries at the World AI Conference in Shanghai last month to embrace open-source development and warned against hoarding technology behind national security, the message landed because it described a world that states were already building.
China is gaining ground in Asia less through industrial strategy than through alignment with that vision; the American approach asks countries to stake their future on a supplier that has shown it will cut them off. For much of the region, the sovereign choice has been made, and it runs along an open road that happens to go through China.


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Countries seeking sovereign AI want to control their own AI capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform


Countries seeking sovereign AI want to control their own AI capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform.


Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI: Geopolitics

AI: Policy

Japan

South Korea

Kazakhstan

Singapore

US-China tech war

China

Technology

United States

Alibaba

Malaysia

Anthropic

DeepSeek

Vietnam

Qwen

Meta Platforms

Huawei Technologies

Nigeria

Africa

Kenya

Xi Jinping

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Asia is reaching for the open road that Chinese AI offers

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Countries seeking sovereign AI want to control their own AI capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform

Countries seeking sovereign AI want to control their own AI capabilities rather than rent them from a foreign platform