Inexpenive AI models developed by Chinese companies are taking the United States by storm, as cost-conscious business leaders turn away from far more costly domestic AI.
From a business perspective, the incentive to do is clear — it’s all about the bottom-line at the end of the day. China’s open source models are much cheaper to run compared to the ones being developed by frontier labs based in the US, so it follows that businesses would choose the lower-cost option.
But as the capabilities of China’s homegrown AI models rise to match those of US models like Claude and ChatGPT, it seems the federal government has also taken notice.
A Switzerland-based commodity portfolio manager shared a screenshot of the document search interface of the Federal Register, the official journal of the US federal government. Far down on the site’s interface is an option to choose a “search mode,” which defaults to “semantic,” but also contains two options for “Qwen3:0.6B,” a large language model developed by the Chinese firm Alibaba Cloud.
