Goldman Sachs: Chinese AI developers may shift to a "paid weight" commercial licensing model

Ronald Keung, the head of Asian Internet Research at Goldman Sachs, stated that as the global usage of Chinese AI models surges, developers may begin to charge commercial licensing fees to cloud platforms for hosting their open-weight models. Currently, most Chinese models are released under permissive licenses such as the MIT License, allowing any user to use, modify, and host them for free, including for commercial purposes.

Keung pointed out that Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 from the Dark Side of the Moon and GLM-5.2 from Zhiyu AI have performance levels that are close to those of leading models in the United States. The adoption rate among small and medium-sized enterprises, both domestically and globally, is very fast, and even large enterprises are beginning to consider using Chinese models. Goldman Sachs believes that model developers can convert the growing use of open-source into actual revenue by requiring third-party service providers to purchase commercial licenses to run model inference on their own infrastructure.