Pattern: China's Open-Weight Era Fading — MiniMax M2.7 and Zhipu GLM-5 Both Go Proprietary

CIW News·medium signal

MiniMax's M2.7 commercial-use ban follows Zhipu AI's decision to release GLM-5 Turbo as proprietary, marking a strategic retreat from open weights by China's leading AI labs. After building developer ecosystems with Apache-licensed models, both are now monetizing API access. For builders depending on open-weight Chinese models, the reliable open pipeline is narrowing to DeepSeek and Qwen — with neither guaranteed to stay open as IPO and revenue pressures mount.