that’s what happens when the western alternatives are 10x more expensive
and closed source
Anthropic banned me for no reason last week, was merely using it for some SaaS project. Appealed, nothing. No reason given other than usage policy blabla.
Google Gemini, unusable, timed out 9 out of 10 times.
Very expensive, and unsustainable in my opinion. All the big boys lack capacity and I doubt they will be able to get that sorted.
Now running Qwen3.6:27B, opensourced by Ali Baba, locally. Works really well actually.
It’s honestly shocking how good Qwen 3.6:27b is, it actually outperforms Qwen 3.5:397b which itself was released only in February. I’m convinced that local models are the future. In a year or two, we’ll probably get to the point where local models are as good as Claude is today, and at that point it kind of doesn’t even really matter if frontier keeps getting better. It’s going to be good enough for vast majority of use cases. On top of that, you can already do a lot with tooling to make the model perform better. This paper is a great example. And I think this is very much an underexplored area. Current agentic harnesses are very primitive in nature, they just give the model some tools to play with, but do little in a way of guidance. ATLAS is a really interesting project in that’s attempting to make a smarter harness, and their results are pretty impressive. If you’re already running Qwen locally, I recommend checking it out.
Personallly, I think qwen3.6 is already pretty close to Claude.
Did not know about ATLAS, will definitely try that out.
It’s really getting there, it’s the first local model that really does feel like frontier quality.
I’ve said this before. The Chinese models are significantly better and will outcompete the models from the US, it was just a matter of people realizing that.
My other prediction, being that they will lobby for tariffs or banning Chinese models outright also seems to be coming true.
A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat
Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to a super PAC bankrolled by executives at OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, is funding a campaign to spread pro-AI messaging and stoke fears about China.
I do wonder how Europe is going to react. Will they just focus on their home grown Mistral or will they consider Chinese open weight models? I feel like the EU is quite wary of anything Chinese and that many people won’t fully comprehend the actual security risk and that they will initially dismiss are avoid them, but they can’t ignore it forever. Qwen 3.6 35B which can be ran at home is already leaving Mistral’s latest models in the dust.
It’s going to be interesting to watch because the usual rationale that China is spying on you doesn’t work for open models people can run locally. And we now see that even in the US, majority of the startups are using Chinese models already. So, there 's a lot of capital invested into continuing to have access to these models. On the other hand, we have these massive AI corps in the US whose entire business model is threatened, and who will spend colossal amounts of money lobbying to ban the competition.
Indeed, that argument doesn’t really work. I suspect the argument will be that they’re untrustworthy and will give a distorted view of reality with subtle propaganda shown with a video of someone asking non open weights Chinese models about Tianamen Square or something.
Another approach is that they will form a cartel for running US inference focused datacenters and will pivot to selling services using it.
I expect the latter will be the likely long term outcome. We already saw Microsoft try to kill Linux in the early 2000s, it was a very similar scenario. MS had a software empire where they were charging absurd licenses for windows servers, and then Linux comes in and all of a sudden people start using open source. And MS literally tried to make open source illegal, eventually they lost and now nobody runs windows on servers anymore, but MS does host giant Linux server farms.
Can’t watch the video what ai do the Chinese offer? Is it safe?
It’s a lot cheaper to use hosted models and it’s open source so you can run them in house and customize them any way you like. And in terms of quality, there’s no significant difference. So, everybody is naturally using cheap and open models.
Among others, the Qwen Coder and Instruct models (by Alibaba) are generally well regarded; MIT Technology Review had a good analysis of Chinese open-weight models in February 2026 – https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/12/1132811/whats-next-for-chinese-open-source-ai/
