South Korean media: U.S. companies favor Chinese AI models, as prices are just one percent of those offered by American firms

Korean Media: Price Difference up to 100 Times — Even U.S. Companies Prefer Chinese AI Models!

On August 7, Korean media outlet Asia Economic Daily published an article stating that, according to observations, U.S. enterprises are clearly showing a preference for Chinese AI models. Analysis indicates that the surge in demand stems from a massive price gap — the cost of using Chinese AI models is only one percent of that in the United States.

It is reported that for OpenRouter services used by U.S. companies to integrate AI into commercial software, the share of Chinese AI based on token usage has recently reached 46%. This figure was around 4% last year's first half, but rose above 30% by February this year and continues to grow steadily. In AI models, tokens serve as the fundamental unit for processing text and are also the standard for measuring cost and usage volume.

As businesses apply AI across all internal services, demand for affordable Chinese AI products has surged. For instance, processing 1 million tokens costs $25 for Anthropic’s “Claude Opus 4.7,” while China’s “DeepSeek V4 Flash” requires just $0.18. That means a price difference of approximately 139 times. One million tokens represent the input capacity of an AI language model at once — equivalent to roughly 700,000 to 800,000 English words.

Differing from U.S. AI companies that generally adopt closed-source models, open-source models dominate in China. Closed models see costs escalate sharply with increased token usage. According to reports, the "GLM-5.2" model launched last month by Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI has already surpassed certain models from Anthropic in usage ranking on OpenRouter. Last month, U.S.-based AI startup Lindy switched its artificial intelligence model from Anthropic to DeepSeek.

Experts note: “Due to export restrictions, people are increasingly questioning whether AI models made in the U.S. can be reliably used. Chinese AI is more stable because it includes numerous reproducible open-source models, allowing enterprises to download and run them on their own servers.”

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1872845987030028/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.