Manus is reportedly pursuing a US$500 million financing round at a US$4 billion valuation, a proposed transaction that would put a fresh number on one of the most unusual corporate stories in the China-founded AI-agent market. The financing has not closed. Its terms remain under discussion, and new investors have not been identified publicly.
Chinese AI models may be spreading quickly, but a new Rhodium Group comparison suggests their developers are still generating far less recurring revenue than the two largest U.S. frontier labs. Rhodium estimates the annual recurring revenue, or ARR, of China’s AI model businesses at about US$10.7 billion on the latest available 2026 data.
China’s AI hiring is expanding rapidly on Maimai’s recruiting platform, but the most useful signal in its latest report is not the headline growth rate. It is the type of work employers are listing.
Moonshot AI has launched a financial-services solution for Kimi that combines professional data connections, task-specific workflow tools, and enterprise controls for institutional users.
D-Robotics has completed a US$400 million Series C round, giving the Chinese company fresh capital to expand its Sunrise chip portfolio and the software layers it says are needed to develop and deploy AI robots.
Z.ai says it used a GLM-5.3-powered infrastructure agent to help take GLM-5.3-Flash from initial hardware adaptation to a production inference service running on more than 100,000 Chinese-made AI accelerators. The September 17 technical account is not a new model release.
A search option linked to Alibaba’s Qwen model briefly appeared on the U.S. Federal Register website before being removed on September 17, turning an otherwise technical feature into a sharp illustration of the political sensitivity surrounding Chinese AI models in American public systems.
Alibaba has added Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash to its Model Studio catalog, documenting a hosted model that accepts text, images, audio, and video while producing text responses.
Huawei has moved its Ascend 960DT schedule forward to the first quarter of 2027 while setting out its most detailed public specifications yet for an up-to-4,096-NPU computing system.
