US companies are increasingly turning to Chinese-built artificial intelligence models for better value for money, as token prices for the most advanced American models continue to climb this year.
Recent releases from Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Z.ai, are seen by many in the industry as highly competitive with leading frontier systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, narrowing the performance gap while remaining significantly cheaper to use.
Models such as Z.ai's GLM and Alibaba's Qwen have become attractive options, offering a combination of performance and cost. Z.ai's GLM-5.2, released in June, narrowly trailed leading US models on public benchmarks and ranked high on several leaderboards while costing dramatically less than comparable closed US frontier models.
OpenRouter, a platform that lets developers access a range of AI models, found Chinese AI model usage by US companies has risen significantly this year. The share of tokens used by US companies on Chinese AI models has sat above 30 percent every week since Feb 8, at times rising as high as 46 percent, CNBC reported, citing the platform's figures. That compares with an average of just 11 percent over the previous 12 months, and a mere 4.5 percent in the first half of 2025.
