US-China AI Rivalry Grows With Alibaba's Anthropic Rival

Summary

Chinese AI companies including Alibaba, DeepSeek, ByteDance and Minimax are releasing new models amid intensifying competition and a deepening price war. Alibaba's latest model trails Anthropic on certain benchmarks, while DeepSeek cut prices by up to 50%. Bloomberg Intelligence warns the sector may remain unprofitable for at least three years.

• Alibaba released a new 2.4 trillion parameter open-weight model that trails Anthropic on some benchmarks.
• DeepSeek upgraded its Flash V4 model and cut input/output token prices by up to 50%, retaining its position as the cheapest provider.
• Minimax and ByteDance each launched video generation models within hours of each other, with Minimax's H3 priced at about half of some peers for high-res video.
• Intense price competition is raising market adoption but also pressuring profitability across the Chinese AI sector.
• Bloomberg Intelligence's Robert Leaf expects the sector to stay deep in the red for the next three years unless pricing rationalizes.