Best Chinese AI Models in 2026: Kimi, Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM and MiMo Ranked

The best Chinese AI model in October 2026 is not DeepSeek. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.1 Pro, released on 23 October, scores 46 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5, ninth of every model the index tracks and 12.4 points behind Claude Opus 5.5. Its weights are promised for 4 November, so until then the best Chinese model you can download is DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash-1017 at 32.5, just ahead of Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 at 31.7. Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 29.9 but finishes an index task for just $0.26, the lowest cost of the top downloadable models.

This guide ranks the best Chinese AI models on one independent board, so the numbers compare like for like. Artificial Analysis rebuilt that board on 28 October as version 5, which moved every score, so do not compare these numbers with older rankings. For each model you get the score, the price, the licence and the way an ordinary person can actually use it on a Mac or an iPhone. Then come the three questions people search next: why these models are so cheap, how far behind the US labs they really are, and whether they are safe to use.

The Key Takeaways

• Best overall: Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro leads Chinese models at 46 on the Artificial Analysis index v5, at $2 / $10 per million tokens, with open weights promised by 4 November.
• Best open weights: DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 scores 32.5 under MIT. Best value: Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 29.9, also MIT, at $0.26 per index task.
• Best for coding agents: Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 67.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, the highest of any model in Artificial Analysis’s run. Among downloadable models, Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 leads at 41.9%.
• Best free apps: DeepSeek and Kimi both have free iPhone apps in the US App Store, rated 3.9 and 4.7 stars.
• The gap: the best Chinese score is 12.4 points below Claude Opus 5.5, and the best downloadable one about 26 points below. The US government’s CAISI put DeepSeek V4 Pro about 8 months behind the frontier.
• The cost: one index task costs $0.26 on MiMo-V2.6-Pro against $10.04 on Claude Opus 5.5, roughly 39 times less.

Best Chinese AI Models at a Glance

The table ranks the strongest Chinese AI models by their score on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, version 5, read on 28 October 2026, the day Artificial Analysis launched it. Artificial Analysis runs every model through the same nine tests itself, most of them on private question sets, so a vendor’s own benchmark chart cannot inflate the result. Where Artificial Analysis tests several reasoning settings, the score is the model’s highest setting. Prices are the vendor’s list price per million input and output tokens.

Two models in the table have no v5 score yet. Artificial Analysis now marks Kimi K3 as superseded by K3.1 Pro, and it had not re-run GLM-5.3-Flash on the new index when we checked. Three big names are missing altogether because Artificial Analysis has not scored them. Tencent’s Hy4 Preview is a 770-billion-parameter model under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. ByteDance’s Seed 2.1, the model family behind the Doubao chatbot, has no weights on Hugging Face. Baidu’s ERNIE 5.1 has no Artificial Analysis entry either. Without an independent score, any ranking of those three would be a guess.

The Best Chinese AI Model Overall: Kimi K3.1 Pro

Kimi K3.1 Pro from Moonshot AI is the best Chinese AI model overall in October 2026, and by a wide margin. Moonshot released it on 23 October 2026 as a post-trained version of Kimi K3. Artificial Analysis scores it 46.0 on index v5, more than 12 points clear of the next Chinese model, Qwen3.8-Max at 33.6. Eight models from US labs score higher, led by Claude Opus 5.5 (58.4), GPT-6 Astra (56.9) and GPT-6.1 Sol (54.5). Kimi K3.1 Pro keeps K3’s 2.8 trillion parameters, 104 billion of them active per token, and its 1-million-token context window. It costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, a third less than K3. Our Kimi K3.1 Pro explainer covers where Moonshot’s own benchmarks and the independent ones disagree.

There are two catches. Kimi K3.1 Pro is not open yet: Moonshot promises the weights by 4 November 2026, and until they ship Artificial Analysis lists it as a proprietary model. It is also not cheap per job. Artificial Analysis puts one index task at $3.68, because the model writes long answers, against $0.26 for MiMo-V2.6-Pro.

Best Open-Weight Chinese Models: DeepSeek, and Xiaomi MiMo for Value

DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 is the best Chinese AI model you can download today. Artificial Analysis scores it 32.5 on index v5, the top result among models with published weights, with Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 just behind at 31.7. Its weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT licence, one of the most permissive licences in common use. Artificial Analysis notes the catch for every open model on its board: the best of them now sit 26 points behind the leader and below Claude Haiku 5.5, Anthropic’s smallest model, at 36.2.

MiMo-V2.6-Pro from Xiaomi is the best value. Xiaomi released it on 21 September 2026, and Artificial Analysis scores it 29.9. It is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 1.02 trillion total parameters, of which 42 billion are active for each token, and it reads text, images, audio and video.

The price is what makes MiMo-V2.6-Pro stand out. Xiaomi charges $0.435 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens outside China. Artificial Analysis measures the cost of one index task at $0.26, against $0.60 for DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 at DeepSeek’s peak rate and $5.01 for GLM-5.3, the open-weight models closest to it on the board. MiMo’s weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT licence too.

The catch with MiMo-V2.6-Pro is access for ordinary users. Xiaomi sells it mainly as an API. Its own agent app, MiMo Desktop, rules out much of Europe. The download page says: “Not yet available in South Korea, the UK or EU member states.”

Our full guide to Xiaomi MiMo covers the four V2.6 models and where each one runs.

The Best Chinese AI Models by Job

The best Chinese AI model depends on the job, because the overall score hides large differences on specific tasks. Kimi K3.1 Pro wins on the overall index and on coding agents. DeepSeek wins on open weights, MiMo-V2.6-Pro on cost, GLM-5.3 on open coding agents, DeepSeek and Kimi on free consumer apps, and Qwen on range of sizes.

Best for Coding Agents: Kimi K3.1 Pro, or Z.ai GLM for Open Weights

Kimi K3.1 Pro is the best Chinese model for coding agents, and on one test the best model of any kind. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, the agentic coding test inside the Artificial Analysis index, it solves 67.2% of tasks, ahead of Claude Sonnet 5.5 at 63.6%, the previous leader. Its predecessor, Kimi K3, managed only 12.6%. Among models whose weights you can download today, GLM-5.3 from Z.ai leads at 41.9% at its maximum reasoning setting. Qwen3.8-Max (0902) reaches 38.9%, MiMo-V2.6-Pro 34.8% and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 33.8%.

GLM-5.3 costs $1.40 / $4.40 per million tokens. Its weights are public, but under Z.ai’s own GLM-5.3 licence rather than MIT. Teams that want MIT terms and lower cost should look at GLM-5.3-Flash: 320 billion parameters with 18 billion active, $0.15 / $0.50, and 32.8% on the same Terminal-Bench run.

Best Free Chinese AI Apps: DeepSeek and Kimi

DeepSeek and Kimi are the best Chinese AI models for people who just want a free chatbot on their phone. Both publish a free iPhone and iPad app in the US App Store. On 13 October 2026, the DeepSeek app held 3.9 stars from about 12,200 ratings, and the Kimi app held 4.7 stars from about 5,300. Both also work in a browser. Our Kimi vs DeepSeek comparison puts the two apps head to head, from the models they run to where they store your chats.

The models behind the two apps differ. DeepSeek’s current API models are V4.1-Flash, served as the V4.1-Flash-1017 build since 17 October, which scores 32.5 on index v5 and reads images, and V4-Pro, which scores 23.1 and handles text only. Kimi’s app is moving from Kimi K3 to Kimi K3.1 Pro, which Moonshot says is rolling out on Kimi.com and the mobile apps from 23 October. Moonshot has not said whether the free plan gets it, so check the model picker in the app. K3 itself, at 2.8 trillion parameters, is still the largest open-weight model on this list. Our Kimi K3 explainer covers its licence and the hardware it needs.

Best Range of Sizes: Qwen

Qwen from Alibaba is the best Chinese model family if you need more than one size. The flagship, Qwen3.8-Max (0902), scores 33.6 on index v5 and costs $2 / $6. In August 2026 Alibaba also published the text-only model that flagship is built on, Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, which its model card calls the first Qwen-Max-class model in an open release.

At the small end, Qwen3.8-27B is a dense 27-billion-parameter model under Apache 2.0. Its 4-bit version runs on a Mac with 24GB of memory, according to Unsloth, which publishes compressed builds of the model.

For chatting with Qwen, Alibaba runs Qwen Studio at chat.qwen.ai, formerly Qwen Chat, plus desktop apps for Mac and Windows. Its iPhone apps are not in the US or EU App Stores. Our Qwen vs ChatGPT comparison covers what the free tier gets you against OpenAI’s chatbot. Developers reach the larger models through Alibaba Cloud’s API or third-party hosts.

Cheapest Chinese AI Models

The cheapest capable Chinese AI models are GLM-5.3-Flash and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, both at $0.15 per million input tokens. GLM-5.3-Flash charges $0.50 for output. DeepSeek charges $0.60 off-peak and $1.20 at peak, which DeepSeek defines as 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC on weekdays, outside Chinese public holidays. Measured per index task, MiMo-V2.6-Pro is the best value of the top downloadable models. It costs $0.26 a task, against $0.60 for DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 at peak, despite its higher token price. Xiaomi’s smaller MiMo-V2.6-Flash is cheaper still at $0.13 a task, for a score of 26.7. Our DeepSeek pricing guide breaks down the peak and off-peak tiers.

Why Are Chinese AI Models So Cheap?

Chinese AI models are cheap because most of them ship as open weights, which lets many companies host the same model and compete on price. That is the first of three reasons given by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, in a July 2026 analysis. A closed US model has one seller, who sets the price. An open Chinese model has dozens of hosts undercutting each other.

The second reason CSIS gives is efficiency under pressure. US export controls limit Chinese labs’ access to the best AI chips. So the labs lean on cheaper training methods, including learning from the outputs of stronger models, and on efficient inference. Almost every model in the table is a sparse mixture of experts, which activates only a small slice of its parameters per token. MiMo-V2.6-Pro uses 42 billion of 1.02 trillion.

The third reason is strategy. CSIS argues that Chinese labs use cheap, open releases to win developers and become the default choice for anyone who does not need the very best model. The US government’s own testing backs up the value claim. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) found DeepSeek V4 Pro more cost-efficient than GPT-5.4 mini, the cheapest comparable US model, on 5 of 7 benchmarks.

How Far Behind Are Chinese AI Models?

The best Chinese AI model is 12.4 points behind the best US model on the Artificial Analysis index v5. Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 46.0, and Claude Opus 5.5 scores 58.4. Eight models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta sit in between. The gap is far wider for models you can download today: DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017, at 32.5, is about 26 points behind. Artificial Analysis said v5 widened the gap between the top open-weights model and the leader from 3 points to 12. It now builds 60% of the index on private test sets or held-out answers, which labs cannot train on.

In time, the gap is measured in months, not years. In its evaluation of DeepSeek V4 Pro, CAISI concluded that the model’s capabilities “lag behind the frontier by about 8 months”. CAISI also found that DeepSeek’s own benchmarks flattered the model. On DeepSeek’s numbers, V4 Pro looked level with models released two months earlier. On CAISI’s tests, which include unpublished benchmarks, it performed like GPT-5.

The CAISI result is the reason this guide uses one independent board. A Chinese model’s launch chart often shows it beating Claude or GPT, and DeepSeek V4 Pro shows how far a vendor’s own chart and an outside test can drift apart.

Are Chinese AI Models Safe to Use?

Chinese AI models are safe enough for everyday work when you control where your prompts go. The same model carries very different risks depending on whether you use the Chinese company’s own app, run the open weights yourself, or reach the model through a third-party host.

The Official Apps Send Your Data to China

The official Chinese apps process your data in China. DeepSeek’s privacy policy states that “we directly collect, process and store your Personal Data in People’s Republic of China.”

Treat anything you type into a Chinese company’s own app or API as stored under Chinese law, and keep confidential work, health details and client data out of it. Our guide on whether DeepSeek is safe for US and EU users covers the government bans and the specific risks.

Open Weights Change the Picture

Open weights take the Chinese lab out of the data path, because the model runs on hardware you or your host control. CSIS makes the point directly: when a Chinese model runs through a third-party host or a local deployment, “the original Chinese developer cannot see the prompts”. Licence matters here too. MiMo-V2.6-Pro, GLM-5.3-Flash and DeepSeek V4.1-Flash use MIT, and Tencent Hy4 Preview uses Apache 2.0. Kimi K3, GLM-5.3 and Qwen3.8’s open flagship carry their own licences with extra conditions, and Moonshot has not yet said which licence the Kimi K3.1 Pro weights will use.

Censorship Is Built Into the Models

Censorship is the one risk that open weights do not remove, because it lives in the model itself. CAISI tested DeepSeek models on politically sensitive questions in 2025. It found they “echoed four times as many inaccurate and misleading CCP narratives as U.S. reference models did.”

For coding, maths or summarising a contract, this rarely matters. For anything touching Chinese politics, history or Taiwan, check the answer against a Western model.

How to Use Chinese AI Models on a Mac or iPhone

The easiest way to use Chinese AI models on a Mac or iPhone is through the free DeepSeek and Kimi apps, or through Qwen Studio at chat.qwen.ai. All three need an account and process your prompts in the cloud. DeepSeek and Kimi run on their makers’ servers, and Qwen’s privacy policy says its data is stored and processed in Singapore.

Running a model locally on a Mac is realistic only at the small end. Qwen3.8-27B in 4-bit form needs a Mac with 24GB of memory. The flagships are out of reach: Kimi K3’s 2.8 trillion parameters and MiMo-V2.6-Pro’s 1.02 trillion need a multi-GPU server. Our ranking of the best open source AI models lists which open models a laptop can handle.

Compare Them Without Four New Accounts

Choosing between DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM and Qwen does not have to mean four sign-ups, four apps and four sets of terms. Fello AI puts all four in one app on Mac, iPhone and iPad, next to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Ask a Chinese model and a US model the same question in the same window, and see for yourself whether the cheaper answer is good enough.

The Verdict

DeepSeek started the Chinese AI story, but it no longer leads it. On independent testing, Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro is the best Chinese AI model by a wide margin, 12.4 index points behind Claude Opus 5.5 and the top scorer of any model on Terminal-Bench 4.0. Among models you can download today, DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 leads, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Pro is the cheapest per finished task, and GLM-5.3 is the open pick for coding agents. DeepSeek and Kimi remain the easiest way in, with free apps. Watch 4 November: if Moonshot ships the K3.1 Pro weights, the best Chinese model and the best open model become the same one. For most everyday work, the remaining gap to the US labs matters less than a price gap of up to 39 times. For confidential work, run open weights on infrastructure you trust, or stay with a US model. For a wider view that includes the US labs, see our monthly ranking of the best AI models.

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