CNBC reported on the 7th that rising pricing from leading U.S. AI vendors is
prompting rapid uptake of Chinese large AI models in U.S. enterprise deployments
on cost grounds. Industry sources say top Chinese open-source and open-weight
models lag frontier U.S. models (OpenAI, Anthropic) by roughly 6–9 months on
performance but are priced about 60%–90% lower and cover most routine AI tasks.
Aggregator OpenRouter data shows Chinese models have accounted for over 30% of
tokens called by U.S. firms each week since Feb. 8, peaking at 46%; the prior
12‑month token-share average was 11%.
