Chinese AI models will slash adoption costs, says Singapore’s GIC

One of the world’s biggest AI investors said the emergence of the latest Chinese models has significantly raised competition with US rivals and will cut the cost of adoption globally.

GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, has put AI at the heart of its investment strategy, ploughing billions of dollars into the emerging technology over the past few years.

It led a $30bn funding round for Anthropic in February, positioning itself for a massive windfall if the company behind Claude follows through on plans to go public this year.

Yet the recent launch of large language models from Chinese labs such as Moonshot and DeepSeek has shown the gap between the US and China in developing state of the art AI is narrowing, and sparked speculation that American tech companies could be overvalued.

“It’s something that we have been looking deeply into,” Bryan Yeo, GIC’s chief investment officer, told the FT. “We see the emergence of more of these open-weight models, some of which are from China, and we think it’s actually a positive for the global AI ecosystem because it’s going to bring costs down.

“By bringing costs down, it [leads to] faster, broader... adoption of AI across many companies and industries. As a result, the use cases are only going to grow... exponentially.”

© Lauryn Ishak/BloombergOpenAI and Anthropic have been valued at close to $1tn by investors this year on the basis that they can continue to develop world-beating models. The availability of cheaper Chinese models would cast doubt on those lofty valuations.

Yeo would not be drawn on whether the latest Chinese open-weight models — which are freely available to download — would pose a threat to US labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, whose expensive frontier models remain closed.

The White House has claimed that recent leaps in performance from Chinese models have only been achieved by piggybacking on US models.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios said Moonshot’s l…