A US AI start-up backed by Nvidia and the Trump administration has unveiled its first open-weight model, boosting American ambitions to compete with Chinese groups that dominate the market for public, customisable AI products. Reflection AI claimed on Monday that its first model, Beam, was on a par with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, a leading Chinese competitor. The start-up is strategically significant for the US in its AI race with China as well as for Nvidia, which is aiming to create rivals to the biggest labs including Open AI and Anthropic.
Reflection said Beam outperformed US peers, “delivering competitive performance on coding and agentic tasks at a fraction of the token cost”, but had not yet published full technical details. Reflection has partnered with the Pentagon and the US Department of Energy, as well as striking agreements to develop AI models for US allies including South Korea as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to fend off Chinese competition. Reflection raised more than $4bn since its launch in 2024, racing to a $25bn valuation before releasing its first model.
Open-weight models, which users can customise and run on their own hardware, can be far cheaper for businesses to operate than the most advanced versions of Open AI’s Chat GPT or Anthropic’s Claude. In August, open-weight models accounted for 56 per cent of all tokens processed through AI cloud application company Vercel’s AI Gateway, up from 7 per cent in December. Some Trump administration officials — including Treasury secretary Scott Bessent — have floated the idea of imposing sanctions on Chinese models thought to be stealing IP from American competitors.
Nvidia has invested $800mn into Reflection and provided access to its chips, helping the company gain ground on Chinese rivals. Reflection has also been backed by venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Disruptive and 1789 Capital. At a congressional hearing last month, Bessent urged American companies to develop more open-weight models, saying they were needed to reduce the dominance of closed models developed by Open AI and Anthropic.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing