Amir Efrati reports that 21% of The Information’s surveyed subscribers said they used Chinese AI models. The figure applies to that publication’s subscriber survey—not to all businesses, enterprise AI users or the general public. The article names DeepSeek and Moonshot’s Kimi K3 as examples.
What the survey says about open-source AI at work
The Information’s survey reports two separate measures of workplace use: 46% of subscribers said they used at least some open-source AI models for work, while 20% said open-source models accounted for a majority of their AI workloads. The first figure measures any use; it does not mean those models were the main tools people used.
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The report describes Chinese alternatives as open-weight models. That label alone does not establish that a model is fully open source or that its license permits every intended use. The article does not provide a model-by-model licensing analysis.
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Efrati suggests the result may reflect recent progress in AI models and agents, including their ability to work with other applications, run in the background and produce better code. These are possible explanations offered in the article, not demonstrated causes of the survey result.
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The article also describes Claude and Gemini use rising relative to ChatGPT over the preceding year, while ChatGPT remained ahead and had regained some ground in recent months. It mentions Microsoft Copilot and other tools as well. These are time-bound observations from this subscriber survey, not independently verified measures of market share.
How representative is the result?
The Information’s subscriber base is weighted toward enterprises with software-development experience, according to Efrati. That audience may be more inclined than the broader business population to try open-weight models, but the article does not establish how much that affected the result.
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The retrieved article text does not state the survey’s sample size, field dates, full question wording or sampling method. Without those details, readers cannot assess its precision or determine whether the findings represent a wider population. Treat the figures as reports about surveyed subscribers only.
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- 21%: surveyed subscribers said they used Chinese AI models.
- 46%: subscribers said they used at least some open-source AI models for work.
- 20%: subscribers said open-source models made up a majority of their AI workloads.
The figures describe reported use, not how often people used a model, which tasks they used it for, or whether their organizations approved it for sensitive work. The article does not compare DeepSeek, Kimi K3 or other named tools on quality, cost, security or license suitability; those questions require model- and use-specific evidence.
Source: The Information, “Chinese Open Models Win Over One in Five of The Information’s Subscribers,” by Amir Efrati. The retrieved text does not establish a publication date.
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