Chinese labs claim nine of the top 10 text-to-video spots
The chatbot wars get the headlines, but the clearest evidence of China's AI lead is showing up on a different leaderboard: video generation. Nine of the world's ten best text-to-video models are now Chinese, and the analysts watching say the lead points somewhere bigger than Hollywood.
Chinese AI labs hold nine of the ten top-ranked text-to-video models on Artificial Analysis' leaderboard, with Google's Gemini the only non-Chinese system in the top tier, Bloomberg reports. Writing over the weekend, Bloomberg's Catherine Thorbecke said the models are gaining global adoption and argued the video lead could give Chinese labs an edge in building world models — the AI systems that learn to simulate environments, widely seen as a route toward more general intelligence. Artificial Analysis' blind arena standings back the framing: Google's Gemini Omni Flash leads the text-to-video bracket, with MiniMax's H3 just behind, and ByteDance's Seedance 2.0, Alibaba's Wan and Kuaishou's Kling 3.0 filling out the top ranks.
The leaderboard is the endgame of a year-long video war the US largely ceded. OpenAI's Sora — the model that ignited the text-to-video moment in 2024 — was shelved after the company balked at the operating costs of a resource-intensive service, according to the LA Times. Chinese labs stepped into the void with models that ship faster and iterate harder, and the capital followed: Kling recently pulled a $2.8 billion financing round backed by Alibaba and Tencent, while Alibaba has kept shipping its own Wan video line in parallel. The result is a rare category where Chinese labs don't just match US output — they set the benchmark everyone else is measured against.
Why it matters beyond entertainment: video generation is increasingly treated as a training ground for world models, and whoever owns the best video architectures may own the foundation for the next phase of AI. If the world-model era gets built on Chinese video stacks, the industry's center of gravity shifts another step away from Silicon Valley — the same pattern already playing out across chips, open-weight models and price. For US labs, the video category is now the sharpest demonstration of the gap, and the open question is whether anyone builds a serious challenger while Sora sits on ice.
What to watch: whether OpenAI revives a video push before the world-model race is decided, and whether Google's Gemini can hold the top spot against the Chinese cluster.
If Chinese labs own the video stack, do they also own the path to world models — or is the race still wide open? Tell us in the comments.
