Something shifted in the American AI developer market around February 8, and the numbers make it hard to ignore. Chinese-built AI models crossed the 30% threshold of weekly token usage among US users on OpenRouter, the popular API aggregation platform that lets developers swap between dozens of large language models.
That number has held above 30% every week since, peaking at 46%. To put the trajectory in context: these same models averaged roughly 11% of US token usage across the prior year.
From footnote to force
The climb started well before February. A joint analysis by OpenRouter and Andreessen Horowitz traced Chinese open-source models from approximately 1.2% of platform token usage in late 2024 to nearly 30% at various points in 2025, based on a sample of 100 trillion tokens.
By the week of February 24, the trend reached a new watermark. Chinese models captured 61% of total token volume among the top 10 models on the platform that week.
