The rise in the prices of OpenAI and Anthropic models is pushing US companies towards cheaper Chinese AI solutions. According to CNBC, models developed by DeepSeek, Z.ai and other Chinese companies have become a serious alternative to American competitors in terms of both performance and price.
According to statistics, the share of tokens spent by US companies on Chinese models on the OpenRouter platform, where developers connect to various AI models, has exceeded 30% every week since February 8, and in some weeks reached 46%. For comparison, this figure was an average of 11% last year and only 4.5% in the first half of 2025.
Experts say that open-source Chinese models cost 60-90% cheaper than the leading models of OpenAI and Anthropic. For example, the US startup Lindy plans to save millions of dollars by switching all traffic from the Claude model to DeepSeek in June.
However, companies are not yet abandoning American models completely. Due to concerns about security and data protection, Chinese models are mainly used for non-critical tasks such as coding, translation and text summarization. In regulated areas, Claude and ChatGPT still maintain their market leadership.
