Some large-scale AI models in China are 90% cheaper than those in the US; Chinese AI's high cost-effectiveness is capturing the US market.

According to a report by CNBC on July 7th, influenced by the continued price increases of models from leading US AI vendors, Chinese AI large-scale models are rapidly expanding their application scale in US enterprises due to their cost-effectiveness advantage. Industry insiders point out that the performance of some leading open-source and open weighted models in China is currently about 6 to 9 months behind the technology of top-tier US models such as OpenAI and Anthropic, while the price is 60% to 90% lower, and they can cover the vast majority of routine AI tasks, thus gaining popularity among US enterprises. According to statistics from the AI model aggregation platform OpenRouter, since February 8th of this year, the proportion of Chinese AI models used by US enterprises has exceeded 30% weekly, reaching a peak of 46%; while the average proportion in the previous 12 months was 11%. Another industry statistic shows that in the first week of the launch of Zhipu's latest large-scale model GLM 5.2, the daily average number of word calls increased by 27 times and the number of customers increased by 80 times, making it the fastest-deployed model on the platform in 2026; US AI startup Lindy has significantly reduced costs after switching all its AI business to DeepSeek models, and expects to save millions of dollars within a few months. (CCTV Finance)