Chinese LLM providers have matured quickly. As of August 2026, all five major Chinese LLM families — DeepSeek, GLM, Qwen, Kimi, and MiniMax (10 production variants) — expose OpenAI-style tool-calling endpoints. A bare API base URL swap will often give you a valid response. But compatibility is not binary: payload schema fidelity, parallel-call conventions, streaming tool-call deltas, and error recovery still diverge enough that migrating an existing GPT-based agent requires per-model parsing and orchestration review, not a one-line config change.
Executive summary
Every model variant we tested supports an OpenAI-compatible /chat/completions endpoint, but compatibility is a spectrum.
GLM-5.1 and MiniMax M3 score 70.1 on the BenchLM tool-use suite, ahead of GPT-5.5's 67.8 (as of Aug 21, 2026).
Qwen3.7-Max is close at 68.8 but is only available through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio in mainland China.
