Chinese AI Models in October 2026: DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM and MiMo Compared

Short answer: In October 2026 the cheapest strong Chinese model is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (MIT licence, about $0.15 / $0.60 per million tokens off-peak). For multilingual and agent work, Qwen3.8-Max leads; for coding agents, GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 are the main picks. Between April and September 2026, eight of China's ten frontier model families released downloadable weights for a current flagship — DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, Tencent Hunyuan, Huawei openPangu and Xiaomi MiMo. ByteDance Seed and Baidu ERNIE 5 remain app- and cloud-only. ([AsiaAI.FYI](https://asiaai.fyi/guides/china-frontier-models-tracker/)) The lineup | Model | Lab | Released | Licence | API price (in / out, per 1M tokens) | |---|---|---|---|---| | [DeepSeek V4.1 Flash](/models/deepseek-v41-flash) | DeepSeek | 10 Sep 2026 | MIT | $0.15 / $0.60 off-peak, $0.30 / $1.20 peak | | [DeepSeek V4 Pro](/models/deepseek-v4-pro) | DeepSeek | GA 13 Aug 2026 | MIT | $0.66 / $1.98 off-peak | | [Qwen3.8-Max](/models/qwen38-max) | Alibaba | 2 Aug 2026 | Custom (large); Apache 2.0 for [Qwen3.8-27B](/models/qwen38-27b) | $2 / $6 | | [Kimi K3](/models/kimi-k3) | Moonshot AI | Weights 27 Jul 2026 | Kimi K3 License | $3 / $15 | |