A tier list of China's top 19 open model builders. Who did we miss? At the frontier * DeepSeek * Qwen Close competitors * Moonshot AI (Kimi) * Zhipu / Z AI Noteworthy * StepFun * Tencent (Hunyuan) * RedNote (Xiaohongshu) * MiniMax * OpenGVLab / InternLM * Skywork On the rise * ByteDance Seed * OpenBMB * Xiaomi (MiMo) * Baidu (ERNIE) Honorable Mentions * Multimodal Art Projection * Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group * Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) * inclusionAI * Pangu (Huawei) I learned a lot from these. We have so much more we need to do to understand how their AI ecosystem works.