China-built video generation holds the top three leaderboard slots — Kling v3, LTX-2 Fast, Happy Horse 1.0 split the quality frontier
Kling v3 leads at arena score 2031, LTX-2 Fast follows at 1930, Happy Horse 1.0 sits at 1893. The top three text-to-video models in June 2026 are all China-built — and Runway, Pika, Veo, and Sora's exit reshape the market.
Kling v3 at arena score 2031 is now the leaderboard leader; Happy Horse 1.0's third position rounds out a China sweep of the top three. The Western frontier of video generation is now a procurement segmentation story, not a leaderboard story.
What "quality leadership" means in practice
Arena-score measures preference on standardized prompts: text-to-video, with human raters voting on quality. Kling v3 leads that on quality. What it doesn't measure is brand-control workflows, character consistency across shots, or marketing-pipeline fit. That's where Runway Gen-4.5 holds professional-market share despite a lower arena score.
The procurement segmentation
The pro video buyer in 2026 uses Runway for marketing+brand consistency (best reference-image and character control); Kling v3 for quality-tier creative shots; Veo 3.1 for photorealism; Pika for stylized lifestyle b-roll. Four tools per pipeline is the new normal — the leaderboard winner gets one slot, not all four.
The Sora-exit implications
OpenAI's Sora shutdown consolidates the field to four serious labs: Google (Veo), Kuaishou (Kling), Alibaba (Happy Horse), Runway. ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 + LTX-2 Fast keep the China-tier field deeper than the Western one. For US-frontier-lab strategy, video generation has become a contested category to exit rather than enter — OpenAI made the explicit choice.
The China-strategy frame
The Kling+Happy Horse+LTX-2 trio is the clearest case of China-built models holding frontier leadership in a specific multimodal capability. Combined with DeepSeek V4's reasoning availability and Qwen 3.7's multilingual+context leadership, China has frontier leadership in three distinct AI capability axes (video, reasoning, multilingual). The Western-frontier-monopoly framing of 2023-2024 is empirically over.
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