Concordia AI analyzes security risks and governance of Chinese open-source models
Chinese laboratories released open-source models such as Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8-Max, and GLM-5.3 this summer, with capabilities only slightly behind the strongest U.S. models, sparking debate over whether open-source models could be misused. Open weights can be cheaply fine-tuned to remove guardrails and cannot be retracted after release, but self-hosting requires chips costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and cloud hosting costs about $50-150 per hour, so the actual barrier to misuse remains high. China's TC260 has named in its AI risk framework that open-source model safety mechanisms may be removed or bypassed, and has begun drafting open-source AI safety standards.