According to CNBC, AI models developed in China are increasingly gaining popularity among U.S. companies, as they narrow the performance gap with top U.S. competitors while offering significantly lower usage costs. On the developer platform OpenRouter, the proportion of tokens used by U.S. companies on Chinese AI models has remained above 30% every week since February 8, peaking at 46%. In contrast, the average over the previous 12 months was only 11%, and it was as low as 4.5% in the first half of 2025. In June of this year, AI startup Lindy shifted 100% of its traffic from Anthropic's Claude model to China's DeepSeek. "After we made the switch, we saw the cost curve drop to the floor," said Lindy CEO Flo Crivello, who expects this decision to save the company millions of dollars within months. Justin Summerville, who oversees data and analytics at OpenRouter, stated that the price of open-source Chinese models could be "60% to 90% lower" than leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI.