China's open-weight AI models now about 4 months behind US frontier

Mozilla's State of Open Source AI report finds China's leading open-weight model, Kimi K3, trails closed US frontier models by roughly four months while costing about 30% as much to use. The models reportedly still lag on some benchmarks.

Why it matters: A four-month gap at a fraction of the cost undercuts the argument that export controls are keeping China meaningfully behind on AI, and cheap, capable open-weight Chinese models are likely to keep gaining adoption among developers who can't or won't pay for closed frontier access.