80% of AI Startups Are Built on Chinese Models: The New Reality for 2026
Chinese developers have overtaken American creators in open-model downloads, with partners at Andreessen Horowitz estimating that nearly 80% of new AI startups are now building on Chinese open-source infrastructure. This shift in developer mindshare stems from a vacuum in the US market: while both nations possess a comparable number of active labs, American releases have frequently been hampered by restrictive licenses and smaller model sizes, a problem exacerbated by recent uncertainty surrounding Meta’s future contributions.
As we head into 2026, the US counter-strategy is pivoting from reliance on a single dominant player (Meta Llama) to a diverse coalition of innovators. Nvidia has arguably taken the mantle of “open leader” with its high-performance Nemotron series, while Ai2’s Olmo 3 is setting a new standard for transparency by releasing the entire development stack—including training data and logs. Alongside them, emerging startups like Arcee, Liquid AI, and Reflection hope to release novel architectures, attempting to lure developers back with specialized capabilities that rival the sheer ubiquity of Chinese open weights models.
