The Chinese AI ecosystem has matured quietly while the world was watching OpenAI. Here are the models you should know about in 2026.
DeepSeek R1
- Arena ELO: 91
- Best at: Advanced reasoning, math, coding
- Cost: $0.55/M tokens
- The standout. Competitive with GPT-5.5 at 1/10 the price.
DeepSeek V4 Flash
- Arena ELO: 89
- Best at: General purpose, high throughput
- Cost: $0.15/M tokens
- The workhorse. 33x cheaper than GPT-5.5.
Qwen 3 (Alibaba)
- Best at: Multilingual, coding
- Cost: $0.10/M tokens
- Ridiculously cheap. Good quality for budget tasks.
GLM-4 (Zhipu AI)
- Best at: Balanced performance
- Cost: $0.20/M tokens
- Consistent and reliable.
Kimi (Moonshot)
- Best at: Long context, document analysis
- Context: 128K tokens
- Excellent for RAG pipelines.
The Problem
Accessing these models from outside China requires a Chinese phone number, WeChat, and Alipay.
The Solution
ModelHub (https://modelhub-api.com/) provides global access to all these models. One API key. International payment. OpenAI-compatible SDK.
Pricing starts at $15/month for 60M tokens. $5 free credit to test.
