“Don’t Sell!” As U.S. Blocks Claude, Chinese AI Sweeps the Market with Prices 57 Times Cheaper

Analysts suggest that while the U.S. government is imposing export controls on Claude's top-tier AI models, Chinese AI models are seizing an opportunity to turn the tables.

Chinese AI models, boasting overwhelming "token cost-effectiveness," are being observed sweeping the market.

According to OpenRouter, an integrated service platform for Large Language Models (LLMs), the top four most-used AI models this month were all from China.

DeepSeek's lightweight model, "V4 Flash," took the top spot, followed by Tencent's "Hy3 Preview," Xiaomi's "MiMo V2.5," and MiniMax's "M3."

Anthropic's "Claude Opus 4.7" and "Claude Sonnet 4.6" ranked 5th and 7th, respectively, while Google's "Gemini 3 Flash Preview" placed 10th.

This marks a reversal from December of last year, when U.S. models dominated the rankings.

OpenRouter is a leading API platform where AI developers worldwide compare and select various AI models. The fact that Chinese models have swept the top spots in token usage is interpreted as a signal that Chinese AI is rapidly penetrating the developer market, where the volume of actual AI usage is high.

The rapid growth of Chinese AI is largely driven by the swift expansion of "AI agents" that perform tasks on behalf of humans.

As this requires a massive amount of tokens, low output costs have emerged as the core competitive edge for AI models.

The output cost for the DeepSeek V4 Pro model is $0.87 per 1 million tokens, whereas the output cost for Anthropic's latest model, "Claude Fable 5," is $50, making it over 50 times more expensive.

It is reported that Microsoft is considering incorporating the DeepSeek V4 model into its enterprise AI tool, "Copilot Cowork," alongside AI models from Anthropic or OpenAI.

Consequently, criticism is emerging within the U.S. that the government's export control measures on Fable 5 and Mythos are actually opening up more business opportunities for Chinese AI companies.

Bloomberg pointed out that "Anthropic's retreat is a victory for Chinese open-source AI," noting that if U.S. AI companies that produce high-performance, cutting-edge models are unable to sell them abroad, the void will be filled by Chinese AI firms.
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.