AI news Oct 17, 2026

Looking back · another angle on the August 6 archive pick

DeepSeek, Zhipu curb closed prices; export rules are a draft

For open weights to hold down closed-model prices, at least one strong vendor has to keep supplying models under permissive licenses at low prices. In July, Kimi K3 added a revenue threshold to its license and priced at the top of the Chinese-model range. Our call then was that Kimi K3 narrowed where the pressure comes from but left intact the mechanism by which open weights push down closed-model pricing. At the time, that pressure came from the few vendors still fully open and cheap: DeepSeek, and Zhipu, the Chinese lab behind Z.ai's GLM models. The facts on K3's license threshold and pricing are in the August 6 issue (August 6 brief). Read with main-line item 2: China's Announcement No. 48 excludes technology already open-sourced or published. The draft's text doesn't say whether newly released weights must be registered first. Whether the next Chinese frontier-class open-weight model has to register before export, and under what license it ships, decides whether open weights can still hold prices down. Zhipu's and DeepSeek's current license terms are as recorded in the August 6 issue; any changes since then haven't been checked. How we checked →