China AI Explained
Core terms, foundational labs, and regulatory frameworks — verified from primary sources.
- What does “AIGC” mean?AIGC is the everyday Chinese industry term for generative AI. Chinese regulations use a different, formal term.
- Who are China’s “six AI tigers”?A Chinese media label for six foundation-model startups: Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Baichuan, StepFun and 01.AI.
- China’s generative AI rules, explainedFour rules shape how AI services reach users in China: algorithm recommendation, deep synthesis, generative AI services and content labeling.
- Chinese AI glossaryThe fixed English renderings AIGC.NEWS uses for common Chinese AI terms, rules and industry vocabulary.
- How Chinese model releases usually happenWhere Chinese labs publish weights, prices and announcements, and which of those count as primary evidence.
- Why Chinese AI labs bet on open weightsUnlike closed frontier labs in the West, Chinese labs use open weights as their primary distribution strategy to build developer mindshare and win enterprise workloads.
- China’s embodied AI and humanoid robotics boomHow China's dense hardware manufacturing supply chain combined with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to accelerate general-purpose humanoid robots.
- How Chinese labs adapt to compute constraintsArchitectural innovations like Multi-head Latent Attention, cluster networking, and heterogeneous inference platforms allow Chinese labs to build frontier models under export restrictions.
- The Chinese model API price war, explainedWhy Chinese foundation model API pricing fell by over 90% in 2024–2025, and how commodity token economics differ between Chinese cloud giants and Western AI providers.