How to access Chinese LLM chatbots across the world

For users in the West, finding these Chinese models and trying them out can feel challenging, owing to language barriers and registration requirements. And indeed, there are still hoops to jump through if you don’t have a valid Chinese phone number.

But in fact, a lot of the chatbots support conversations in English and are surprisingly easy to access. Whether you’re just curious to find out how well they perform or want to conduct more serious experiments for work, there are lots of ways to access Chinese LLM-powered chatbots. 

Here’s how anyone can try one out in minutes. 

If you have a Chinese phone number

First of all, if you have a Chinese phone number, there’s little trouble accessing any of the models we describe. In China, a domestic phone number is often a proxy for identity verification, and with it, you can basically access any online service, including AI chatbots. You just go to the model’s website and use the number to register an account. 

In our tests, we found that while some LLMs are accessible for users outside China, a few major ones, including models developed by Huawei, the cybersecurity firm 360, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, can only be accessed with a Chinese phone number. Unfortunately, if you are outside China, getting a local phone number can be close to impossible. Luckily, there are other ways.

Accessible without a Chinese number

A small number of Chinese AI platforms allow users outside China to access their chatbots directly. All you need to do is sign up, enter your phone number, and then enter the verification code you’ll get in a text message.

These chatbots include Doubao, an AI made by ByteDance that can generate text and images, search the internet, and make a summary of the documents you upload. ChatGLM, a multimodal tool developed by the newly emerged Chinese AI unicorn Zhipu, offers a similar set of features and is also available to non-Chinese numbers. 

Finally, DeepSeek, an AI company that’s barely a year old, is known in the industry for how cheap its model is. (It’s free for casual users but costs $0.14 per million tokens for business users. OpenAI’s similar model, GPT4-Turbo, costs $10 per million tokens.) You can easily test out its text chatbot and coding chatbot on its website by registering with an email address.