Chinese AI taking over America

A Chinese startup has launched the world’s largest publicly available
AI model (dispelling ideas they lag far behind the U.S.), as data attributes
almost 60% of U.S. firms’ AI usage to cheaper services from China

WEEKLY TOKEN SHARE OF CHINESE AI MODELS
USED BY U.S. FIRMS ON OPENROUTER (%)*

J
2025
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D

J
2026
F
M
A 
M
J
J

60
50
40
30
20
10
0

JAN 6,
2025
4.4%

JUL 6,
2026
56.8%

In just 18 months, use of Chinese
AI models by U.S. businesses has
increased by factor of almost 13

*OpenRouter: Programming interface that allows developers
to easily access over 500 Large Language Models (LLMs),
including those from likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google,
as well as LLMs from countries outside U.S.

*Token: Before AI can read your text input, it chops it up into smaller pieces –
process called tokenization. Each unit of data (token) that LLM processes is
roughly equal to one “syllable” of a word

WEEKLY TOKEN SHARE OF MAJOR CHINESE AI MODELS
USED BY U.S. FIRMS ON OPENROUTER (%)*

DeepSeek: 21.0
Z.ai: 10.6
Qwen: 2.6
MiniMax: 1.7
Other: 62.5

Kimi: 1.6
Kimi K3 (from AI startup Moonshot) just unveiled – claims to
deliver performance approaching that of Anthropic’s Fable,
once deemed too dangerous for public use

Sources: Reuters, Bloomberg, OpenRouter
Illustration: Google Gemini
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