Xiaomi just gave away one of the most capable AI systems in the world, for free. The new MiMo-V2.6 models can be downloaded by anyone, run on a company's own servers, and built into commercial products without paying Xiaomi a license fee. This is notable because Xiaomi is not an AI company, it sells phones, rice cookers, and electric cars.
The release comes in two main versions. MiMo-V2.6-Pro is the flagship, built for the hardest tasks, while MiMo-V2.6-Flash is a cheaper, faster version aimed at everyday use.
Xiaomi also offers an UltraSpeed option that responds up to twenty times faster for jobs where speed matters more than squeezing out the last bit of quality, such as live customer chat.
On an independent scoring system called the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, MiMo-V2.6-Pro now ranks as the strongest open-source model available anywhere, ahead of other free Chinese models like Kimi K3 and Qwen. It still sits behind the best paid systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, but that gap has been closing month over month.
The price is the part business owners should pay attention to. Xiaomi kept pricing at the same level as its previous model, with the Flash version costing a fraction of a cent per page of text processed either way.
The flagship Pro version still costs well under a dollar for a million words processed, which is a fraction of what comparable paid systems from major Western labs charge. For a company running thousands of customer support chats or document reviews a month, that difference adds up fast.
Why would Xiaomi do this for free? Because Xiaomi doesn't make its money from AI subscriptions, it makes money from selling connected phones, smart home gadgets, and cars under a strategy it calls Human times Car times Home, where every device works together.
Free, capable AI built into all of it makes Xiaomi's whole product lineup more useful, and it costs Xiaomi far less to give the software away than to build a subscription business around it the way OpenAI or Anthropic must.
This fits a bigger pattern. Chinese-made open AI models recently overtook American ones in global download share for the first time, and a growing number of U.S. businesses are already building on Chinese open-source models because they are cheap and capable. That said, security researchers and a U.S. government commission have flagged that routing business data through Chinese-linked AI providers carries real data jurisdiction and content restriction concerns worth weighing first.
For a business owner, the practical takeaway is this: capable AI is rapidly becoming a commodity that costs next to nothing to access, and companies that used to sell AI as a product are under new pressure to justify their prices. Whether or not you use Xiaomi's model specifically, expect your AI tool costs to keep falling this year.