How Chinese model releases usually happen
Where Chinese labs publish weights, prices and announcements, and which of those count as primary evidence.
The usual release bundle
Major releases often land on one day as a bundle: weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope, a technical report, the consumer app, the API and a price list. DeepSeek’s R1 release on January 20, 2025 is a typical example: MIT-licensed weights, a technical report, app and API access, and per-token prices on the same page.
Benchmark comparisons in these announcements are the lab’s own claims. AIGC.NEWS labels them Company-reported until a named third party tests them.
Where to look
Hugging Face and ModelScope organization pages list new weights. API documentation “news” pages and developer platforms carry prices and model names. Many companies also announce on their WeChat official accounts, which we enter manually because they have no feed.
AIGC.NEWS treats the lab’s own page, repository or platform as Tier 1 evidence and media coverage as Tier 2.