Alibaba’s Qwen3 and Moonshot’s Kimi-K2 crack top 10 AI rankings, closing in on US models

Two new Chinese artificial intelligence models have broken into a top 10 leaderboard for both open- and closed-source models, highlighting China’s progress in closing the gap with leading US developers.

Alibaba Group Holding’s 1 trillion-parameter Qwen3-max-preview model debuted in sixth place in the latest “text arena” ranking by LMArena – an AI model evaluation platform started by University of California, Berkeley researchers – making it the top Chinese model.

Meanwhile, Alibaba-backed start-up Moonshot AI’s updated Kimi-K2 model tied for eighth place with seven other models, including DeepSeek R1 and xAI’s Grok 4, reinforcing its status as one of the premier open-source models globally.

Qwen3-max-preview – Alibaba’s largest AI model to date – and Kimi-K2-0905 were both released on Friday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

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The achievement stands in stark contrast to a year ago, when no Chinese models were represented in LMArena’s top 10 leaderboards, which is based on user feedback. Users submit prompts to two anonymous models and vote for the one that provides the better answer. The models’ identities are then revealed.

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