This Economist article (link below) suggests Chinese AI should not be feared by European businesses because of its low cost, open source and predictions about access compared to American innovation. Are they right? Or are the disadvantages worse than claimed?
Excerpt:
There are three reasons why European firms should welcome this Chinese onslaught. First, Chinese models are nearly as good as the best that Openai, Anthropic and Google can offer—which for most users is good enough. Demis Hassabis, Google’s ai supremo, has said that Chinese ais are only “a matter of months” behind American ones. Like DeepSeek, most cost nothing to access and relatively little to operate.
This cost advantage comes from their openness—the second reason why they ought to appeal to European firms. In contrast to proprietary black boxes peddled by leading American firms, open models can easily be fine-tuned and run on local infrastructure. Using them averts the risk of being locked in to any one provider. If Openai or Anthropic went belly-up, their customers would be in a bind. If DeepSeek were to fold, users could keep running its models’ “weights”, the parameters learned during training, on their own data and their own servers—which also allays data-theft fears. American firms like Meta also offer open models. But China is leading the way.
There is one last reason why welcoming Chinese ai is in Europeans’ interest: it offers insurance against lock-out, as well as lock-in. Before Donald Trump took the oath of office for the second time, also a year ago, it would have been absurd to worry about European access to American technology. As he recklessly exploits the transatlantic alliance over Greenland, an executive order limiting American ai firms’ business in Europe no longer seems unthinkable. Some European restrictions on American technology, including the computing clouds where ais reside, are also plausible.
Although, in a fragmenting world, Europe’s best option may be to nurture its own ai industry, it is not about to become a model-building superpower. But it can still be a world leader in putting the technology to work. Already, 37% of eu businesses report using generative ai, on par with America.
Link:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/01/22/chinese-ai-is-a-risk-for-europe-so-is-shunning-it