China's AI giants abandon paywalls to fight US dominance
Source: The Verge
Chinese AI startups like Moonshot are open-sourcing frontier models and offering free access to compete with OpenAI and Claude. In this phase of the market, distribution and user adoption matter more than extraction revenue—at least until consolidation begins. The strategy mirrors Android's displacement of iOS in mobile: flood the market with capable alternatives, betting that whoever owns the user base and application ecosystem wins, regardless of initial monetization. This inverts Silicon Valley's playbook and forces the US to either match the subsidy or accept ceding early-market dominance in AI capability.