China's AI Registry Reveals 5,300+ Tech Firms Driving Growth

Unlike in the US, where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind dominate the market, China's competition to build foundational AI remains diverse and contested. But building these models is costly, and the market is beginning to consolidate. China's six "AI tigers"--Moonshot, Minimax, Zhipu, Baichuan, 0.1AI, and Stepfun--are all backed by Alibaba or Tencent.

ByteDance's Doubao surpassed DeepSeek as China's most popular chatbot, but its spot at the top is not assured. While the giants duke it out for chatbot supremacy, startups are hard at work in every sector imaginable. Founder Derek Li says his 12-year-old company is leaps beyond the ed-tech competition.

They "put wheels on a horse," he says, bolting AI onto their existing stale software. Squirrel claims to diagnose knowledge gaps, measure progress, and adjust lessons in real time. When China banned for-profit tutoring in 2021, the company's revenues collapsed overnight.

It pivoted to licensing its platform to franchisees who also sold the company's AI-powered tablets. Squirrel's network includes more than 3,000 centers across China, serving 1.2 million students. Now, the company is eyeing expansion to the US.

Li, who withdrew his sons from a private school in Shanghai so that they could be home-schooled on Squirrel's platform, says that "in the future, teachers won't teach knowledge." Instead, he says, "they'll become data analysts, understanding learning reports and students' ability, and psychologists, understanding emotions and shaping their personalities." AI Kanshe (translated as "AI Sees Tongue") is a traditional Chinese medicine startup that analyzes health through images of the tongue, palms, and face.