The owner of TikTok is developing an AI model on the scale of Mythos. Is this a threat to Anthropic and OpenAI?

ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, has begun training an AI model that could rival Mythos 5—Anthropic’s most advanced model—in terms of scale, according to the Financial Times (FT). Chinese developers continue to close the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI, although the number of parameters does not yet guarantee comparable quality.

ByteDance is training a model that could have up to 10 trillion parameters, three sources told the FT. That’s three times more than Moonshot’s Kimi K3—the largest Chinese model released to date. Pre-training is currently underway, which typically takes three to six months; the model will then undergo further training and, if all goes well, be released.

Anthropic does not disclose the size of its systems. According to industry estimates cited by the FT, the cutting-edge Mythos 5 has about 8 trillion parameters, while Fable 5 has around 5 trillion. Several Chinese labs are currently training Fable 5-level models, but ByteDance has set the most ambitious goal—the company aims to create the world’s largest language model. However, while the number of parameters determines a model’s basic capacity and the limit of the amount of information it can store, its actual capabilities also depend on data quality and training methods, the FT emphasizes.

ByteDance has been developing AI models on its own for over a year, without using distillation from other systems (a method in which some AI models are trained using larger neural networks), one of the FT’s sources said. There is a view in the industry that this is causing the company to progress more slowly than its competitors, but ByteDance’s management believes that the only way to outperform rivals is through independent development. According to the British newspaper, two weeks ago, company founder Zhang Yiming urged the AI development team—led by former Google DeepMind scientist Wu Yonghui—to create a “world-class” model and not to worry about temporarily falling behind.

ByteDance keeps a low profile: unlike many Chinese developments, most of its models remain proprietary. At the same time, ByteDance’s video generator, SeeDance, ranks among the world’s most powerful, and its flagship model for the general public, — the virtual assistant and chatbot Doubao — remains the most popular in China, with 324 million monthly active users, according to the FT.

Work on the super-large model is underway at a time when all three of China’s IT giants—ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent—are shifting their priorities from consumer products to enterprise solutions. Back in 2025, they were following OpenAI’s lead and investing in a general-purpose chatbot, but the battle for mass adoption did not yield the expected results: the user base for Tencent’s Yuanbao and Alibaba’s Qwen consumer AI apps quickly shrank after peaking, while Doubao spent tens of millions of yuan daily on computing costs while generating less than 1 million yuan in revenue, according to“China’s equivalent of The Information”— LatePost.

According to LatePost, Chinese companies subsequently cut back on user acquisition spending, and ByteDance executives traveled to the U.S., visiting Anthropic among other places—and upon their return, decided to shift some resources to corporate products. In the summer of 2026, the company dismantled Feishu, its collaboration service: the product team was merged into Doubao, while sales and marketing were merged into the cloud-based Volcano Engine. Meanwhile, Alibaba consolidated its competing projects into “Qianwen Office”—the office agent in the Qwen lineup—while Tencent focused its main efforts on the office agent WorkBuddy.

OpenAI may postpone its IPO until 2027 in order to achieve a valuation of about $1 trillion. According to The Information, the company's CEO, Sam Altman, also supports a 2027 offering.

Anthropic, a competitor, may go public as early as this fall. Like OpenAI, it has already filed a preliminary IPO application. Following its most recent funding rounds, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion, while OpenAI was valued at $852 billion.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor