As corporate AI bills spiral out of control, many companies are beginning to ask themselves a simple question: why pay a pretty penny for the US’s leading AI models when Chinese ones are far cheaper?
Major companies like DoorDash, Airbnb, and Siemens are adopting Chinese AI tools, the Financial Times reports, attracted not only by their lower costs but their “open-weight” approach that allows them to be molded to each company’s particular needs.
According to data from OpenRouter, a platform that provides all-in-one access to major AI models and tracks their usage, leading Chinese models from DeepSeek and Z.ai have overtaken US equivalents like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Cost-cutting, it seems, trumps all geopolitical rivalries.
Chinese models are “the elephant in the room,” Eugene Cheah, CEO of the AI platform Featherless AI, told the FT. “Enterprises are starting to realize, ‘Hey, we don’t need the best model, we can use the faster, cheaper models.’”
