Atlassian does not use Chinese AI models in production, its CEO says

Atlassian does not run any Chinese AI designs in its items, president Mike Cannon-Brookes stated in an interview with 20VCthe podcast hosted by financier Harry Stebbings.

The episode came out on Monday and was tape-recorded in Amsterdam, where Atlassian held its Team ’26 Europe conference recently.

Stebbings raised the concern, stating SaaStr creator Jason Lemkin had actually informed him huge business do not desire Chinese open designs. Mike Cannon-Brookes stated that might alter, however that Atlassian follows its clients.

“There is definitely some consumer pushback in some locations to, quote unquote, Chinese designs. There is not client pushback to open designs,” he stated.

Rather, Atlassian usages Nvidia’s Nemotron designs through what he called a deep collaboration with the chipmaker, in addition to designs from Mistral and others. Its task is to select the very best design for each job as inexpensively as possible for consumers, he included.

“We do not utilize any Chinese designs in production, we’re extremely clear about that,” he stated.

However, he argued that the line is more difficult to draw than it looks. He declared that lots of United States designs are trained partially on Chinese ones without stating so, however offered no examples or proof.

Declining open innovation that companies can examine will be difficult to sustain, he argued.

“For a business to state I’m not going to utilize a more affordable option that’ll provide me much better outcomes when I understand what’s in it, I believe is going to be a really tough long-lasting option,” he stated.

He was likewise sceptical of business that state they have actually constructed their own AI designs. The majority of them, he stated, have actually taken a Chinese open-weight design and fine-tuned it for one task. Atlassian fine-tunes open designs too, he included, however does not call them its own.

“The jury is truly out on the advantages of constructing specialised designs at the minute,” he stated.

To alter his mind, he stated, specialised designs would need to keep beating the most recent basic designs on cost and efficiency. Couple of do, in his view, and numerous early start-ups have actually considering that been surpassed by the huge structure designs.

Chinese open-weight designs are currently embedded in some United States items. On Monday, Microsoft launched a little choice design developed on Alibaba’s Qwen.

Expense was the other style of the interview. Big consumers now care a good deal about what AI costs them, Cannon-Brookes stated.

Atlassian has a complete AI entrance group that sends out each job to the design that fits it, however he informs item groups not to stress over expense too early.

“If 5 individuals utilize a function, I do not care just how much it costs. If 5 million individuals utilize a function, I’m going to care a lot about expense,” he stated.

Asked what he had actually altered his mind on this year, he stated AI running expenses will fall even more than he as soon as believed.

In July, Atlassian offered its own engineers regular monthly AI budget plans, and in August it reported 28% income development for its 4th quarter.