AI TRENDS | Some Chinese Large AI Models Are Priced Up to 90% Lower Than U.S. Models, Report Says

Some Chinese large AI models are priced 60% to 90% lower than leading U.S. models, and their use among U.S. businesses has been expanding rapidly, a CNBC report said. According to Jin10, CNBC reported that as pricing for models from top U.S. AI providers continues to rise, Chinese large AI models have gained traction in U.S. enterprise applications due to their cost-performance advantage. Industry sources said some leading Chinese open-source and open-weight models are about six to nine months behind top U.S. frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic in performance, but are priced 60% to 90% lower and can cover most routine AI work tasks, making them popular with U.S. companies. OpenRouter, an AI model aggregation platform, said that since February 8 this year, the share of tokens used by U.S. enterprises when calling Chinese AI models has exceeded 30% every week, peaking at 46%. Over the prior 12 months, the average share was 11%, OpenRouter said.