China puts American AI industry on notice yet again with ‘Ernie X1,’ Baidu’s new open-source reasoning model

• Chinese tech giant Baidu released open-source AI models Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5.
• The company says the models rival those from OpenAI and DeepSeek in performance per cost.
• The models also further the AI industry’s turn toward open-source.

Baidu, China’s answer to Google, has released two new AI models.

On Saturday, Baidu released Ernie X1, a reasoning model it says “delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price.”

It also…