China's Open-Model Wave Broadens: GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.6, MiMo-V2.5, ERNIE-Image, Intern-S2 Weights Released

China's open-source AI model ecosystem widened its lead this month as several major labs published new weights. Zhipu open-sourced GLM-5.1, a flagship agent-engineering model strong at long-horizon coding; Moonshot released Kimi K2.6, a natively multimodal agent model; Xiaomi open-sourced MiMo-V2.5, a native full-modal model with a 1-million-token context and an agent focus; Baidu open-sourced ERNIE-Image, an 8-billion-parameter text-to-image model skilled at text rendering; and Shanghai AI Laboratory released Intern-S2-Preview, a 35-billion-parameter scientific multimodal model. The releases follow a year in which Chinese open models captured leading positions on global call rankings and Hugging Face downloads - ModelScope alone now hosts over 120,000 models and Chinese-developed models account for about 41% of platform downloads - underscoring the rising global footprint of China's open-source community.

Source: NavXD Model Index / AI Tools Intelligence, Nov 9, 2026 | 2026-11-09