Reflection AI boosts US ambition to compete with Chinese ‘open’ models

A US AI start-up backed by Nvidia and the Trump administration has unveiled its first open-weight model, boosting American ambitions to compete with Chinese groups that dominate the market for public, customisable AI products.

Reflection AI claimed on Monday that its first model, Beam, was on a par with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, a leading Chinese competitor. The start-up is strategically significant for the US in its AI race with China as well as for Nvidia, which is aiming to create rivals to the biggest labs including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Reflection said Beam outperformed US peers, “delivering competitive performance on coding and agentic tasks at a fraction of the token cost”, but had not yet published full technical details of the model’s performance. Tokens are units of information processed.

Reflection has partnered with the Pentagon and the US Department of Energy, as well as striking agreements to develop AI models for US allies including South Korea as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to fend off Chinese competition and expand its own sphere of influence.

Reflection raised more than $4bn since its launch in 2024, racing to a $25bn valuation before releasing its first model.

Open-weight models, which users can customise and run on their own hardware, can be far cheaper for businesses to operate than the most advanced versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude.

The search for a leading US open-weight model has become more urgent in recent months as usage of the tools has surged, with Chinese labs behind most top models. In August, open-weight models accounted for 56 per cent of all tokens processed through AI cloud application company Vercel’s AI Gateway, up from 7 per cent in December.

Some Trump administration officials — including Treasury secretary Scott Bessent — have floated the idea of imposing sanctions on Chinese models thought to be stealing IP from American competitors.

The threat prompted an industry-wide letter, led by Nvidia, which stated that an open-weight “ecosystem” was essential for “creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country”.

Nvidia’s boss Jensen Huang has also defended the use of Chinese open-weight models by American businesses, saying they provide good value for companies.

Nvidia has invested $800mn into Reflection and provided access to its chips, helping the company gain ground on Chinese rivals. Reflection has also been backed by venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Disruptive and 1789 Capital, at which Donald Trump Jr, a son of President Donald Trump, is a partner.

At a congressional hearing last month, Bessent urged American companies to develop more open-weight models, saying they were needed to reduce the dominance of closed models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic.

“We can’t let these large labs have regulatory capture because that will stop innovation,” Bessent told lawmakers.

If successful, Reflection’s new model could intensify a price war between the leading labs. The start-up said on Monday that its model would be competitive on “coding and agentic tasks” at a fraction of the cost of US rivals and that it would soon be launching with partners.

US companies using Chinese open-weight models have also come under fire from Republican lawmakers in Washington, who are probing the “national security concerns associated with growing dependence on models developed by entities subject to [People’s Republic of China] jurisdiction”.