Chinese Open Models Take Up to 46% of US Developer Token Use as Costs Surge

CNBC·high signal

CNBC (July 7) reports open Chinese models now run 60–90% cheaper than leading Anthropic/OpenAI models, and US companies' token share on Chinese models via OpenRouter has topped 30% weekly since Feb 8, peaking at 46% versus an 11% twelve-month average. Z.ai's GLM 5.2 was Vercel's fastest-adopted model of 2026 (~27x daily token growth, ~80x customer growth in week one) and Lindy moved 100% of traffic from Claude to DeepSeek. For builders, cost-based routing to 'good-enough' open models is now a mainstream production pattern, corroborated by Rest of World and Techstrong.ai.