Chinese AI video is coming for more than Hollywood

China’s dominance in generative video positions it to lead the development of world models that could define the next era of AI. | Bloomberg

Aug 19, 2026

New large language models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 have dominated the debate about China’s artificial intelligence ambitions. Yet the clearest evidence of the country’s prowess may be in video, and the stakes could extend far beyond just shaking up Hollywood.

Outside of Alphabet’s Google, nearly all of the leading video-generation models are Chinese, making up nine of the top 10 text-to-video systems on benchmarking platform Artificial Analysis’ leaderboard.

ByteDance and MiniMax Group recently released back-to-back updates to their rival video-generation models. That followed the surprise emergence of “Happy Horse,” a secretive video system that rattled the industry before being revealed as an Alibaba Group Holding project. Add Kuaishou Technology’s Kling, Beijing-based ShengShu Technology’s Vidu, as well as a host of other startups, and China has developed an unusually crowded roster of major players in a field that U.S. leaders including OpenAI and Anthropic have deprioritized.

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