Mainland Chinese AI developers may begin charging commercial licensing fees to cloud platforms for hosting their open-weight models, as companies seek to capture more revenue from surging global usage, Goldman Sachs Asia internet research head Ronald Keung said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

The assessment comes as Mainland AI models - such as Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and Z.AI (02513.HK) -214.000 (-16.706%) Short selling $457.93M; Ratio 8.213% 's GLM-5.2 - have reached performance levels only slightly behind leading US competitors.

However, because Chinese developers typically release their models under open-source terms, foreign platforms and developers are free to download, modify and host the core "weights" of the software - the underlying parameters that encode its intelligence.

Keung said Chinese model makers could generate more revenue by requiring third-party vendors to purchase commercial licenses to provide inference services for these models on their own infrastructure.

Keung said adoption growth in the Mainland has been very rapid, believing there has been considerable adoption among SMEs in global markets, and even larger companies have started considering the use of Chinese models.
(HK stocks quote is delayed for at least 15 mins.Short Selling Data as at 2026-07-28 12:25.)