Chinese models now handle more than half of all tokens on OpenRouter, up from 6–13% in February
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
Powerful SI is getting cheaper fast, and the world is voting with tokens for what is more accessible: frontier models are becoming a common good rather than the privilege of a couple of companies.
According to CNBC, in the week of September 14, models from DeepSeek, Z.ai, Alibaba and other Chinese companies accounted for 57–67% of all tokens on OpenRouter; on Vercel their share grew from 11% in January to 55% in August. Among companies in 82 countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia, Chinese models account for about two-thirds of tokens. The growth is attributed to low prices and strong results in coding and agentic tasks, although American models are still ahead in revenue. Two US House committees are investigating the consequences of this spread.