Alibaba confirmed on Friday that it built HappyHorse 1.0, the anonymous AI video model that surged to the top of global benchmarks this week, overtaking ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and entering a market already shaped by strong competition from Kuaishou’s Kling.
The model first appeared as a mystery entrant on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena leaderboard, reaching the number one position in both text-to-video and image-to-video categories before its creator’s identity was disclosed. In the silent video rankings, HappyHorse achieved an Elo score of 1333, opening up a lead of roughly 60 points over Seedance 2.0.
The project was developed by an innovation unit within Alibaba’s newly established Token Hub business group. It was led by Zhang Di, a former vice president at Kuaishou who previously headed the technical development of Kling AI, and who rejoined Alibaba in November after five years away. Zhang’s track record speaks for itself. Kling AI recently reached an annualised revenue run rate of $240 million, making it one of the few AI video platforms to demonstrate genuine commercial traction at scale. That he’s now leading a rival effort underlines how fiercely Chinese tech companies are competing for top talent in generative video.
AI Video Week understands that Kling has new model announcements of its own in the pipeline, so the competitive picture is far from settled. The AI video generation race in China is moving at a pace that makes quarterly product cycles look leisurely.
HappyHorse is a 15-billion parameter open-source model built on a unified self-attention Transformer architecture. It processes text, image, video and audio tokens within a single sequence rather than relying on separate pipelines for each modality. It generates video with synchronised audio natively, supporting lip sync across six languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German and French. The model outputs at 1080p and is described as being on track for open-weight release, with an API to follow.
The timing adds extra weight. OpenAI recently discontinued its Sora video generation app, citing a strategic shift towards coding tools and enterprise clients amid high compute costs. Sora was costing roughly $1 million per day to run while its user base had collapsed to fewer than 500,000. Meanwhile, ByteDance was forced to pause the global rollout of Seedance 2.0 following copyright disputes with major Hollywood studios and streaming platforms. The Motion Picture Association sent a cease and desist letter alleging that unauthorised use of intellectual property was systemic rather than incidental.
With Sora gone and Seedance’s international expansion stalled, Alibaba’s entry reshapes the field. An open-source model at this performance level could change the economics of self-hosted generation pipelines for studios and agencies. Native audio with multilingual lip sync, if it works as advertised when the weights ship, addresses one of the persistent technical gaps in AI video production.
The anonymous debut followed a pattern that’s becoming standard among Chinese AI labs. Xiaomi recently used the same approach when its model MiMo-V2 attracted attention under the pseudonym Hunter Alpha. The tactic generates buzz through benchmark performance before the brand reveal. It works, though it raises fair questions about whether leaderboard entries from undisclosed labs carry the same credibility as those from identified ones.
The model is currently in closed beta. An API rollout and open-weight release are expected soon.
