Artificial Intelligence

Nine of the Top 10 AI Video Models Are Now Chinese

Nine of the top 10 text-to-video AI models on Artificial Analysis are built by Chinese labs. What that ranking means for an EU or UK buyer choosing an AI video vendor.

Artificial IntelligenceBy Servola Tech Desk2026-08-104 min read

AI-assisted, edited by humans. | Editor-in-Chief: Leon Soliman | Editorial standards

Nine of the Top 10 AI Video Models Are Now Chinese

The leaderboard marketing teams are not reading

Artificial Analysis runs one of the more widely cited independent benchmarks in AI, scoring text-to-video systems on prompt-following, motion coherence and visual fidelity rather than taking a vendor's demo reel at face value. Its text-to-video leaderboard, as of early August 2026, puts nine of the top 10 models with Chinese developers. Bloomberg's Catherine Thorbecke reported the same reading of the board in an August 9 column, arguing the story is bigger than the entertainment industry it is usually filed under.

The names doing the winning are Alibaba, on both its Wan line and a newer model that shipped under the name Happy Horse, ByteDance's Seed team behind Seedance, MiniMax with its Hailuo and MiniMax H3 models, and Kuaishou's Kling. The one model breaking the sweep is Google's Gemini Omni Flash, which holds the top spot outright. OpenAI's Sora, the name most marketing teams in Europe still default to, does not appear in the top 10 at all.

How the gap opened this fast

None of this happened quietly. Chinese labs have been shipping new video models on a roughly monthly cadence through 2026, each one landing near the top of the board on debut, which is what happened with Alibaba's Happy Horse model in April. Consumer scale is part of the engine: PixVerse, one of the smaller Chinese players, already counts more than 150 million registered users feeding real usage back into the product. At the lab level, Alibaba, ByteDance and Kuaishou are running video generation as a strategic product line, not a side project, and pricing it aggressively enough that European vendors built on licensed Western models struggle to match it on cost per clip.

The catch: sovereignty, not just quality

The quality lead is real, but it arrives with a compliance question most marketing teams have not been asked to think about. Feed a Chinese-hosted video model a prompt built from a customer photo, an employee's face for an internal training clip, or footage of a named individual, and that is a transfer of personal data outside the European Economic Area under GDPR Article 44. China has no EU adequacy decision, so the transfer needs its own legal basis, standard contractual clauses at minimum, and the UK's ICO has been just as clear that a UK business owes the same duty even when the tool sits behind a slick, English-language interface.

There is a second layer past the data question. Many of these tools are governed by terms of service written under Chinese law, with retention and re-use rights over anything you upload that a European legal team would not sign off on if it were a cloud contract. And a vendor operating this close to state-directed compute allocation carries export-control exposure that a marketing procurement checklist was never built to catch.

The actual tradeoff, not a ban

None of this argues for a blanket ban, and a business that imposes one will simply pay more for a worse result. The workable line is what goes into the prompt. Generic B-roll, product shots, stylised backgrounds and stock-style footage carry little personal-data risk and are a fair place to use the strongest available model, Chinese or not. Real customer footage, employee likenesses, or anything biometric belongs on a shorter list of vendors that can show a signed data processing addendum, and it is worth checking whether a given tool is accessed directly from a Chinese-hosted API or through a Western reseller layer, because that changes the legal answer.

Procurement should also expect the vendor list to keep moving. A model that tops the board in April can be pushed down within weeks by the next release, so an AI-video vendor clause needs a review cadence built in, the same way a cloud data-residency clause does, rather than being signed once and filed away.

The bottom line

The capability gap in text-to-video is not a marketing claim any more, it is what an independent leaderboard shows on the day this was checked. What is new for a European or British buyer is not the quality lead, it is that the strongest vendor increasingly sits outside the jurisdiction the rest of the marketing stack was built to comply with. Expect AI-video procurement in the EU and UK to split along a residency line in the next year, not just a price and quality line, and expect the businesses that write that clause first to be the ones still using the best model when a competitor gets stuck explaining an unreviewed vendor contract to their DPO.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Artificial Analysis leaderboard and why does it matter here?

It is an independent AI benchmarking platform that scores video models on measured criteria such as prompt-following and motion quality rather than vendor marketing. Because it is not run by any of the labs it ranks, its text-to-video board is a fair reference point for a procurement decision, which is why Bloomberg cited the same data.

Which Chinese labs are actually leading, and where does that leave OpenAI's Sora?

Alibaba (Wan and Happy Horse), ByteDance's Seed team (Seedance), MiniMax (Hailuo, MiniMax H3) and Kuaishou (Kling) fill nine of the top 10 spots. Google's Gemini Omni Flash is the only non-Chinese model in the top 10, and it holds the number one position. OpenAI's Sora does not place in the top 10 on this board.

Can a European or UK business legally use a Chinese AI video tool?

Generally yes, but not without homework. If any prompt or output involves a real person's face, voice or likeness, that is a personal-data transfer outside the EEA under GDPR, and China has no adequacy decision, so you need standard contractual clauses or another valid safeguard in place, plus a look at the vendor's own data-retention terms, before you use it on anything but generic, non-personal creative footage.

The quality gap in AI video did not just widen, it moved outside the jurisdiction most EU and UK marketing contracts were written for, and that is the part procurement has not caught up to yet.

Artificial Analysistext-to-videoKling AIAlibabaByteDanceMiniMaxAI vendor sovereigntyGDPR

A Police Dashboard on 700 Foreigners Sat Open

A police surveillance dashboard in Zhangjiakou held profiles on more than 700 foreign residents and 300 foreign journalists, and it was left unsecured. The vendor patent behind it is the part that should change how you brief staff travelling to China.

4 min read

Law & Regulation

Your Vendor Decides When Your 72 Hours Start

CareCloud's records system was hit on 16 March. It determined on 24 June that data was taken. Letters went out from 30 July. Your GDPR clock is 72 hours.

6 min read

Decisions

The Third Pivot Was the Warning Magic Leap Missed

Magic Leap filed a WARN notice for 193 layoffs effective 1 October 2026, its fourth strategic pivot after $4 billion raised. The lesson is the pattern, not the pivot.