AI tiger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
'AI tiger' (Chinese: AI六小虎, romanized: AI liù xiǎohǔ, lit. 'Six AI little tigers')[1] is a term for notable startup companies in the artificial intelligence industry in China.[2][3] There are commonly six companies defined as AI tigers: Z.ai (GLM), Moonshot AI (Kimi), MiniMax, Baichuan, StepFun, and 01.AI.[4][5][6][7] Funding rounds for the tigers are led by BATX, China's four largest tech firms, which themselves release models Ernie Bot, Qwen, Hy3, and MiMo.[8]
| Chinese | AI六小虎 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Literal meaning | Six AI little tigers | ||||||
| |||||||
Aylon Berger of the Lowy Institute argued the AI tigers are far more constrained by financial capital relative to frontier US laboratories. Z.ai and Minimax's initial public offerings on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Z.ai at US$558 million on 8 January 2026, and Minimax at $620 million on 9 January, were contrasted to the hundredfold valuations of OpenAI at $500 billion and Anthropic at $183 billion.
Observers note US restrictions on investment abroad combined with China's foreign investment controls simultaneously stifle US-China AI deals. Many non-AI-focused Chinese companies have sought "China-shedding" or "Singapore-washing", opening a business entity in Singapore to allow foreign investment or acquisition including by US Big Tech. However, China's National Development and Reform Commission in May 2026 blocked the acquisition of Manus, an AI agent company, by US conglomerate Meta Platforms, that was announced in December 2025. This signalled a crackdown on what the government of China views as a national security asset.[7][9][10]
StepFun has attempted to differentiate itself with its focus on multimodal models incorporating text and video input.[11]
