Claude shut down subscription access on OpenClaw. That sent a lot of people looking at Chinese models. Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu. Some run at a tenth of the cost. They are multimodal: text, image, video.
The trade-offs are real. More hallucination. Weaker tool use. Smaller context window. You need to write tighter tool definitions or you will see drift fast. I still hand coding tasks off to Claude Code for anything that requires precision.
What People Are Talking About
Kimi K2.5 — trending as the OpenClaw default
positive
Kimi K2.5 has official Moonshot API documentation for OpenClaw and was revealed to be the base of Cursor's Composer 2 model (with RL fine-tuning). Community reaction was huge — 665 upvotes on r/singularity, 417 on r/cursor. At $3/1M output tokens (8x cheaper than Claude) with a 256K context window and Agent Swarm (up to 100 parallel sub-agents for 3–4.5x speedup), it's the most discussed replacement.
r/singularity 665↑, r/cursor 417↑, r/aiagents 1108↑, platform.moonshot.ai/docs
MiniMax M2.5 — best validated SWE-Bench score among Chinese models
positive
MiniMax M2.5 scored 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified — only 0.6 points behind Claude Opus 4.6 and ahead of every other Chinese model — at $1.20/1M output tokens (20x cheaper than Claude). Named alongside Kimi K2.5 in the top-voted OpenClaw cost post (1108↑) as what practitioners are running 24/7. Fastest execution of the three (37% faster than M2.1), but no multimodal or Agent Swarm.
r/aiagents 1108↑, MiniMax official, kilo.ai benchmark, artificialanalysis.ai
GLM-5.1 (Zhipu) — highest code quality but platform reliability issues
mixed
GLM-5.1 launched March 27 2026 to strong reception (846↑ on r/LocalLLaMA). In side-by-side tests it scored 90.5/100 on code quality vs. MiniMax's 88.5. However benchmarks are entirely self-reported, weights for 5.1 are not yet released, execution is 2x slower than MiniMax, and the Z.ai platform has compute reliability issues. 'GLM-5 nearly matched Claude Opus 4.6 at 11x lower cost' is the headline claim (331↑).
r/LocalLLaMA 846↑, r/LocalLLaMA 331↑, kilo.ai benchmark, wavespeed.ai
OpenClaw cost crisis driving local model adoption
neutral
The most-upvoted OpenClaw-related post of the month (1108↑, r/aiagents): 'If you have your OpenClaw working 24/7 using frontier models like Opus, you're easily burning $300 a day — $100,000 a year.' The author replaced with local Kimi K2.5 and MiniMax2.5, spending one-third the yearly cost on hardware. US Congressional report warned 80% of American AI startups now run Chinese open-source models (1166↑).
r/aiagents 1108↑, r/InterstellarKinetics 1166↑, r/openclaw 458↑
Chinese LLM scene — rapidly maturing
positive
'The current state of the Chinese LLMs scene' (r/LocalLLaMA, 481↑): ByteDance doubao leads proprietary, DeepSeek leads open-source reasoning, Kimi/MiniMax/GLM compete for agentic coding. All three have MIT or commercial-friendly licenses. Zhipu is the only one trained on non-Nvidia hardware (Huawei Ascend 910B).
r/LocalLLaMA 481↑, r/StableDiffusion AI News March 2026
Community Sentiment
Kimi has the most narrative momentum. MiniMax has the most credible benchmark story. GLM generates excitement on release but skepticism around benchmark methodology lingers. The overarching theme is cost — Claude Opus is seen as prohibitively expensive for 24/7 agentic use, and all three Chinese models are 8–25x cheaper on output tokens.
Key Takeaways
Kimi has the most narrative momentum. MiniMax has the most credible benchmark story. GLM generates excitement on release but skepticism around benchmark methodology lingers. The overarching theme is cost — Claude Opus is seen as prohibitively expensive for 24/7 agentic use, and all three Chinese models are 8–25x cheaper on output tokens.
- Kimi K2.5 is the community-consensus trending replacement — official OpenClaw integration, Cursor's Composer 2 built on it, Agent Swarm for parallel agentic tasks, 8x cheaper than Claude.
- MiniMax M2.5 is the safest technical bet — highest validated SWE-Bench score (80.2%), fastest execution, 20x cheaper than Claude. Better for pure coding pipelines where image input isn't needed.
- GLM-5.1 produces the highest-quality code in head-to-head tests but is held back by self-reported benchmarks, unreleased weights, 2x slower execution, and Z.ai platform reliability issues — monitor rather than adopt now.
The valuation play
MiniMax and Zhipu are both listed on the HKEX. Market cap around ~$40B. That is roughly 1/20 the size of OpenAI, 1/10 of Anthropic.
Neither has nailed their revenue model yet. That is the real story. Claude's move is sending usage their way. Usage that trains the next model. A revenue line that did not exist before. The valuation bet is that they convert this moment into both.
| Company | Status | FY2025 Revenue | Rev Growth | ARR (Latest) | Valuation | Mkt Cap / Rev | Gross Margin | Net Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Private | $13.0B | +250% | $25B Feb'26 | $852B | 65.5x | ~45%ᵉ | Neg. |
| Anthropic | Private | $4.5B | +1,080% | $30B Apr'26 | $380B | 84.4x | ~50%ᵉ | Neg. |
| xAI / Grok | Private | ~$218M* | — | ~$500M* | $200B+ | N/M | N/M | Neg. |
| Zhipu 2513.HK | HKEX | ~$100M | +132% | — | $44.7B | 447x | 41.0% | Neg. |
| MiniMax 0100.HK | HKEX | $79M | +159% | — | $38.3B | 485x | 25.4% | Neg. |
All USD · Private co. = last funding round · Public = live market cap
*xAI standalone AI revenue (Q1–Q3 2025); excludes X Corp. ᵉ Estimated.