According to CNBC, AI models developed in China are increasingly popular with US companies because they are closing the performance gap with top US competitors while being significantly cheaper to use. On the developer platform OpenRouter, the percentage of tokens used by US companies for Chinese AI models has remained above 30% weekly since February 8th, reaching as high as 46% at its peak. This compares to an average of only 11% over the previous 12 months, and a further 4.5% in the first half of 2025. In June, AI startup Lindy switched 100% of its traffic from Anthropic's Claude model to the Chinese company DeepSeek. "After we made the adjustment, we saw the cost curve plummet to the floor," said Lindy CEO Flo Crivello, who expects the decision to save the company millions of dollars within months. Justin Summerville, who heads data and analytics at OpenRouter, stated that open-source Chinese models can be "60% to 90% cheaper" than leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
