One Mountain, Six Tigers

The Chinese press named six AI tigers, but DeepSeek forced a harsher sorting. In the end, the race may come down to the old proverb’s logic: one mountain, and only so much room at the top.

In December 2024, word slipped out of the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre: five venture investors had filed a claim against Yang Zhilin, the founder of Moonshot AI and, at that moment, the most celebrated young technologist in China. His chatbot, Kimi, had gone viral for swallowing two million Chinese characters in a single sitting. Alibaba’s money had pushed his company’s valuation past $3 billion. And the people hauling him into arbitration weren’t rivals or regulators. They were his own former backers: investors in Recurrent AI, the enterprise-software company Yang had co-founded years earlier, who said he’d walked away, started Moonshot, and raised a fortune without the written waivers their shareholder agreements required. One of the five was Zhu Xiaohu of GSR Ventures, who had spent the previous two years telling every conference audience in China that betting on homegrown large-model startups was a fool’s trade.

From Washington, Chinese AI looks like a monolith. Beijing picks its champions, subsidy flows downhill, and the companies advance in formation, interchangeable parts of one national machine. The only rivalry worth tracking, in that telling, is the one between countries.

Up close, none of it holds. The past two years read less like an industrial-policy white paper than like a serialized business melodrama: founder defections, arbitration filings, a spoiler nobody thought to classify, a sprint for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Chinese press even supplied a cast list. It called them the Six AI Tigers.

The cast

Start with Zhipu. Zhipu AI was spun out of a Tsinghua University lab by the professor Tang Jie and the CEO Zhang Peng, and it was the academic heavyweight, the closest thing China had to a university lab turned national asset. Moonshot was Yang’s company, the consumer darling; its Chinese name, 月之暗面, borrows from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which tells you something about the self-image of its founder. MiniMax was built in Shanghai by Yan Junjie, who came up through SenseTime. Baichuan belonged to Wang Xiaochuan, the former CEO of the search engine Sogou and a folk hero to a generation of Chinese engineers who learned to type on his input software (he invented the Sogou intelligent Input Method). 01.AI was the late-career bet of Kai-Fu Lee, the former Google China chief whose book AI Superpowers had forecast this contest years before he entered it. And StepFun was founded by Jiang Daxin, who ran engineering inside Microsoft’s Asian research operation and kept the lowest profile of the six.

All six were unicorns by early 2024. All six drank from the same watering holes, too. Alibaba and Tencent turn up across their cap tables like a bettor covering every horse in the race, alongside the usual state-backed funds. One crowded wager, spread across the litter: that China’s answer to OpenAI would come from this list.

The crowding is what made the drama inevitable. When one fund holds stakes in three tigers, every financing round becomes a signal about which cub the family favors. When a founder’s old company and his new one share a lineage, an arbitration filing stops being a contract dispute and turns into a succession fight. These were rivals who shared bankers, bloodlines, and often the same Tsinghua hallways, and the Chinese press covered them the way it would cover a dynasty.

The animal nobody classified

Then January 2025 arrived, and the wager collapsed from a direction nobody was watching. DeepSeek wasn’t on the list. It wasn’t even a startup in the ordinary sense. It was a research lab bankrolled by High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund in Hangzhou, run by a founder, Liang Wenfeng, who gave few interviews and hired for math-olympiad medals. Its R1 model matched frontier-class reasoning, and then the lab did the destabilizing thing. It gave the weights away and priced its API in pennies. The product all six tigers were selling, access to a world-class Chinese language model, was suddenly something you could download before lunch.

That same month, Washington added Zhipu to the entity list. The price war that followed was brutal in the way only a commodity price war can be. By this year, Chinese model usage had narrowed to three names: Alibaba’s Qwen, DeepSeek, and Zhipu’s GLM. Three, in a country that had trained hundreds. The mountain was shrinking under everyone standing on it.

The sorting

Zhipu reached the gate first, listing in Hong Kong on January 8, 2026, as one of the first pure foundation-model labs to go public anywhere, and it has kept shipping since the bell; GLM is now one of the three model families Chinese developers actually reach for. MiniMax followed the next day, and its shares jumped on debut because MiniMax had the one thing public investors could evaluate without a PhD: consumer products with real audiences, the companion app Talkie abroad and the assistant Hailuo at home. StepFun never needed the exchange. A state-owned fund led its financing in December 2024, and Jiang’s trillion-parameter Step models made the company a strategic asset for Shanghai, which is its own kind of exit.

Baichuan and 01.AI took the path down the other face of the mountain. Wang Xiaochuan narrowed his company to medicine; the man who built China’s second search engine now talks mostly about AI doctors. Kai-Fu Lee announced that 01.AI would stop chasing frontier-scale pretraining altogether, rebuilt the firm around an enterprise platform, and signed a contract to build Kazakhstan’s national language model. Both companies are now described in the Chinese press with the phrase every founder dreads: facing funding challenges.

Which leaves Yang Zhilin in the most interesting seat on the mountain. Moonshot answered DeepSeek in kind, open-sourcing its Kimi K2 models from mid-2025 and shipping successors fast enough to stay on the benchmark leaderboards; reports in early 2026 put a fresh $500 million round at a $4.3 billion valuation. But the arbitration filed in 2024 still isn’t resolved. A clouded cap table is a heavy thing to drag through an IPO window, and Hong Kong’s window won’t stay open forever. The most gifted consumer-AI founder in China may end up watching two rivals ring the bell while five of his old investors hold his listing hostage.

What the mountain charges

Benchmarks and parameter counts were the scoreboard everyone watched. The sorting that decided things ran on duller axes. Was the cap table clean? Would people actually pay for the thing, could you reach the Hong Kong window while it stood open, and was there a state fund to carry you once the venture money lost its nerve? DeepSeek made the model itself cheap, and once the model was cheap, the expensive things turned out to be everything wrapped around it: distribution, ownership, timing, and the judgment to know which fight to walk away from. Lee quit pretraining and survived. Jiang took the state’s patronage and stopped worrying about the next round. Yang refused to quit anything, and his reward is the richest and most precarious position in the whole story.

The arbitration in Hong Kong grinds on. Zhu Xiaohu, the man who called the entire category a fool’s trade, is still pressing his claim against its brightest founder, and there’s a version of this that ends with him owning a slice of the very thing he doubted. It would be the most honest ending Chinese venture capital could write for itself. The press has already started auditioning names for the survivors.