01.AI winds down its open model platform
China's AI shakeout produced its clearest retreat of the week: Kai-Fu Lee's 01.AI is winding down its developer platform, while Chinese robot makers extended their shipment dominance and the country's model price war finally started reversing.
01.AI, the model startup founded by Kai-Fu Lee, will shut down its open model platform, stopping online demos, API calls and recharge services for developers, according to reports in DoNews and Sina. Once counted among China's "six little tigers" of AI startups, 01.AI told users the platform will gradually wind those services down; the company has not publicly commented. It is the latest step in a long retreat: 01.AI abandoned trillion-parameter frontier pretraining in 2025, saw its pretraining and infrastructure teams fold into Alibaba's, and pivoted to enterprise deployment through its Wanzhi platform. Now the developer-facing API business is being ceded too. The message to the market is blunt — independent labs are exiting the commodity model-API race one by one, leaving DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen to own developer mindshare, and developers still on Yi APIs are left planning a migration.
Chinese manufacturers shipped more than 97% of the world's humanoid robots in the first half of 2026 — roughly 19,100 units, nearly four times the 5,100 shipped a year earlier, according to Bloomberg's Saritha Rai. The numbers, carried by Techmeme, quantify a dominance the market has watched build all year: Unitree's landmark mainland IPO and a stream of home-robot funding rounds kept the sector in headlines (we covered Unitree's $9 billion IPO — Unitree prices $9B humanoid IPO, first in mainland China — and the ex-Huawei team's $70 million raise — Ex-Huawei team raises $70M for fold-up home robot). The practical consequence cuts both ways: Western buyers get cheaper robots, but the supply chain, training data and scale economics are consolidating in one country.
DeepSeek told developers it plans a "significant" across-the-board API price increase, and Alibaba is weighing a revenue-sharing license for its next flagship Qwen3.8-Max — the clearest sign yet that China's two-year model price war is reversing. DeepSeek's API documentation now flags an upcoming peak/off-peak pricing scheme that would double prices during Beijing rush hours (9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00), on top of current V4-Flash rates of 1 yuan per million input tokens and 2 yuan per million output tokens. Reuters, cited by TMTPost, reported that Alibaba's new license would keep Qwen3.8-Max's weights open but require large commercial users to share revenue, with the split ratio and license text still under discussion. The leverage is building: Chinese models have now led global API call volume for 15 straight weeks, with the official DeepSeek-V4-Flash release topping the latest chart — when everyone's already using your model, charging more starts to look safe.
What to watch: whether other Chinese labs follow 01.AI out of the developer-platform business — and how big DeepSeek's "significant" increase actually lands.
When a price war ends and a platform shuts down in the same week, who's left standing in China's model race? Tell us in the comments.
