Top Chinese Open-Source Agentic AI Models: 2025 Review & Insights

China continues to lead the charge in open-source large language model innovation, particularly excelling in agentic architectures and deep reasoning capabilities. The landscape of Chinese open agentic and reasoning models is rapidly evolving, with new and influential entrants consistently pushing boundaries.

Among the standout models, Kimi K2 from Moonshot AI emerges as a highly balanced all-rounder. Built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, it boasts an impressive context window of up to 128,000 tokens and demonstrates superior agentic abilities alongside robust bilingual fluency in Chinese and English. Its strengths lie in high benchmark performance across reasoning, coding, mathematics, and complex long-document workflows, making it ideal for general-purpose agentic tasks, document intelligence, and multi-language enterprise applications.

GLM-4.5 by Zhipu AI is a purpose-built solution for intricate agent execution and workflow automation. With 355 billion parameters and native agentic design, it supports extensive context and benefits from an established, MIT-licensed ecosystem that has attracted over 700,000 developers, fostering rapid community adoption. This model is particularly suited for building scalable, deeply agentic, and tool-integrated open LLM applications, including multi-agent systems and research requiring inherent agent logic. Zhipu AI also offers ChatGLM, an “edge-ready” model optimized for on-device agentic applications. Its 1-million-token context window and quantized design make it perfect for mobile deployments, privacy-sensitive scenarios, and resource-constrained environments, offering flexible scaling from cloud to edge devices.

Alibaba DAMO’s Qwen3 and its specialized sibling, Qwen3-Coder, represent a next-generation approach to language models. Qwen3 employs a Mixture-of-Experts architecture that allows dynamic control over reasoning depth and modes, excelling as a dominant multilingual model supporting over 119 languages. It features advanced function-calling and achieves top scores in mathematical, coding, and tool-use tasks. Qwen3-Coder further specializes in code, handling up to 1 million tokens for repository-scale analysis and complex development workflows. These models are invaluable for multilingual tools, global SaaS solutions, multimodal logic/coding applications, and Chinese-centric development teams, offering precise control and world-class code agency.

For applications demanding peak reasoning accuracy, DeepSeek-R1 and its successor V3 stand out. Developed with a “reasoning-first” philosophy and multi-stage Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), DeepSeek-R1 activates 37 billion parameters per query, while V3 expands to 671 billion for unparalleled performance in mathematics and coding. These models set the state-of-the-art in logic and chain-of-thought reasoning, often surpassing Western counterparts in scientific tasks. They incorporate “Agentic Deep Research” protocols for fully autonomous planning, searching, and synthesizing information, making them indispensable for technical and scientific research, factual analytics, and environments where interpretability is paramount.

Wu Dao 3.0 from BAAI offers a practical and modular family of models, including AquilaChat, EVA, and AquilaCode. This open-source suite boasts strong long-context and multimodal capabilities, handling both text and images while supporting multilingual workflows. It is particularly well-suited for startups and users with limited computing resources, facilitating multimodal agentic deployment and flexible application development.

A significant stride towards general AI agents in China comes from Monica AI and its community-driven Manus and OpenManus projects. Manus establishes a new benchmark for general AI agents with its independent reasoning, real-world tool use, and agentic orchestration. It exhibits natural autonomous behavior, from web search and travel planning to research writing and voice commands. OpenManus, highly modular, integrates various underlying models, including Llama variants, GLM, and DeepSeek, for tailored agentic tasks. These models are pivotal for true mission-completion agents, multi-agent orchestration, and open-source agentic frameworks, marking a major step towards AGI-like applications in China.

Finally, Doubao 1.5 Pro and the “Six Tigers” – including Baichuan, Stepfun, Minimax, and 01.AI – round out China’s robust open-source AI landscape. Doubao 1.5 Pro is recognized for its superior factual consistency and logical reasoning structure, supporting a context window of over 1 million tokens. It excels in real-time problem-solving and scalable enterprise deployments where logical rigor is critical. The “Six Tigers,” as identified by MIT Tech Review, each offer strong reasoning and agentic features within their specific domains, such as AIGC for Stepfun, memory for Minimax, and multilingual legal applications for Baichuan. These models cater to diverse applications, from conversational agents to domain-specific logic in law, finance, and science, making them ideal choices for sector-specific requirements and high-value business applications.

The rapid evolution of these Chinese open agentic and reasoning models underscores a commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI, offering powerful, versatile, and often specialized tools for a wide array of computational challenges.