Chinese AI Models Now Take Up to 46% of US Usage

The share of tokens US companies spend on Chinese AI models via the OpenRouter platform has stayed above 30% every week since February 8, 2026, spiking as high as 46% in some weeks — up from just 11% on average over the prior 12 months and 4.5% in the first half of 2025, CNBC confirmed.

The main driver is price: open-source Chinese models can be 60-90% cheaper than flagship models from Anthropic and OpenAI. When a task doesn't need the best model on the market, companies are increasingly routing it to whichever one is "good enough" for less money, Invezz notes.

What this means in practice: this isn't about replacing top-tier models like Claude or GPT for the hardest tasks — it's about everyday routine work, simple queries, text classification, basic data processing, where the quality gap between an expensive and a cheap model no longer matters much for business use, but the price gap clearly does.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.