Open-weight models from China currently play a minor role in the German economy, according to a survey by the digital association Bitkom. Only two percent of companies using AI use DeepSeek, and one percent use Alibaba’s Qwen models. This puts Chinese providers far behind the leading models from the USA.
ChatGPT from OpenAI remains the dominant player by a clear margin: 76 percent of AI-using companies use it, up from 70 percent in the previous year (multiple answers possible). This is followed by Microsoft’s AI assistant system Copilot with 35 percent (2025: 28 percent), which uses both Microsoft’s own AI models and models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Google’s Gemini models follow with 28 percent (2025: 22 percent).
Clearly trailing, Meta’s Llama models reach 8 percent, SAP’s Joule AI functions 6 percent, and Anthropic’s Claude 3 percent of companies. According to the survey, Grok from xAI plays virtually no role, not even being used in one in a hundred German companies. Furthermore, no surveyed company indicated using models from Perplexity or the leading European provider Mistral, based in France. According to Bitkom, 603 companies with 20 or more employees were surveyed, and the results are representative.
