Nikkei: The release cycle of AI models in China and the United States has been shortened to an average of 44 days
According to the Nikkei, the release cycle of new AI models in China and the United States has averaged 44 days since April 2026, about one-third of the previous duration. The report compiled data from five American companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, and four Chinese companies, including Alibaba Group and Moon's Dark Side, showing that the average interval from January 2023 to March 2026 was 125 days, which shortened to 44 days from April to September 2026.Entering September, OpenAI and Anthropic successively released their latest models. Meta has been upgrading Muse Spark monthly since July, and Google launched an updated version of Gemini on September 2 after three weeks. Grok released new models for three consecutive months until August. In China, DeepSeek has been updating monthly since July, and after August, Alibaba and Z.AI, which launched the GLM series, also successively released new models.On September 17, Anthropic announced that as of August, 26% of its development work was dominated by AI, with over 90% involving AI participation, whereas the proportion of AI dominance was nearly zero in February of this year. For OpenAI, in August, AI agents operated 3.1 times longer than human researchers, with average daily usage of about $600 for ordinary researchers, and the top 10% exceeding $7,000; the amount of code written through programming by the company in August reached seven times the average level of 2025.
