Chinese AI models are gaining popularity among U.S. companies as they narrow the performance gap with leading American rivals while remaining significantly cheaper:
Recent model releases from Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Z.ai, are seen by many as highly competitive compared to leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI. These advancements come as token prices for the most advanced models rise at many U.S. AI labs, leaving companies grappling with unexpectedly high costs:
The share of tokens used by U.S. companies on Chinese AI models via OpenRouter has sat above 30%:
Chinese open source and open weight models are becoming increasingly attractive to American companies as AI costs skyrocket:
AI startup Lindy moved 100% of its traffic from Anthropic's Claude models to DeepSeek, allowing them to save millions of dollars:
“We did it, and you could see that cost curve go down,” said CEO Flo Crivello:
Open source Chinese models can be “60% to 90% cheaper” than leading Anthropic and OpenAI models:
