India, June 30 -- Over the last week, a Chinese laboratory, Z.ai, has shown it can build Artificial Intelligence systems capable of matching the American frontier models that can write working software, find security flaws in complex code and reason through long technical problems. It can carry out the kinds of expert work that until recently only the most expensive US systems, such as Anthropic's Mythos, could do reliably. It has done this, moreover, on open weights: making the models freely available to download, run and modify on one's own machines.

Creating such AI models is not merely a tall order, but among the tallest in modern industry, demanding tens of thousands of advanced chips, robust electricity supply, years of accumulated...