Models from seven major Chinese developers generated an estimated US$10.7 billion in annual recurring revenue from March to August, according to a Rhodium Group report published on September 17.

The figure was about a tenth of the combined revenue reported by OpenAI and Anthropic,

The report covered DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Z.ai, MiniMax, Alibaba Group Holding, ByteDance, and Kuaishou Technology, a Beijing-based short-video company that runs Kling AI.

ByteDance led with US$4 billion in July. Alibaba followed with US$2.4 billion in August.

ByteDance’s figure was tied largely to Lark after it restructured the workplace app around AI productivity tools.

Alibaba’s total mainly reflects AI services sold via cloud to enterprise customers.

Chinese developers have also cut prices for model access in a domestic AI price war.

Commercial rollouts must also complete security assessments and meet filing, content, and data-protection rules.

🔗 Source: South China Morning Post

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