Meituan Releases LongCat-2.5, Joining China's Open AI Coding Race

Meituan has released LongCat-2.5, an open model aimed squarely at coding work, pushing the Chinese internet company deeper into the country's fast-growing open AI coding race. Startup Fortune reported the release on November 3, framing LongCat-2.5 as the newest member of Meituan's LongCat model family.

The headline's two operative words are “open” and “coding.” Open implies weights that developers can inspect and run themselves; coding implies the model is built for writing, editing and debugging software rather than general chat, a far more demanding and commercially valuable workload.

Coding has become the most contested arena in the model market because it is measurable. A generated patch either compiles and passes tests or it does not, which gives labs a cleaner signal than open-ended conversation and gives enterprises a reason to pay once a model is wired into their development pipelines.

For Meituan, LongCat is the company's public showcase of model-building capability. The family has previously been released in open form, and the 2.5 update continues that strategy, positioning the delivery-and-local-services group as a participant in AI infrastructure rather than only a consumer of it.

The release lands in a crowded field. Chinese labs have quickened the pace of open model launches, and coding plus agentic tasks have become the new front line, with vendors emphasizing tool use, long task horizons and performance inside real repositories rather than raw parameter counts alone.

For developers, the appeal of an open coding model is control: local deployment, task-specific fine-tuning and code that never leaves the company's own environment. If LongCat-2.5 follows the family's open-weight pattern, it becomes an alternative to closed coding assistants, especially for teams with strict data-handling rules.

Public reporting so far centers on the launch itself; technical specifications, benchmark results and license terms still need to be confirmed from Meituan's own materials. Those details will determine whether LongCat-2.5 is simply another entry in a crowded catalog or a tool that changes developers' defaults.

Three things are worth watching: how the model performs on real engineering tasks, whether the open-source community reproduces and benchmarks it quickly, and whether Meituan builds a developer ecosystem around it. The real test for LongCat-2.5 is not the announcement but whether working developers keep choosing it once the novelty fades.