U.S. companies are increasingly shifting workloads to Chinese AI models to cut costs. DeepSeek leads the trend, but Alibaba's Qwen has also gained significant ground, with the company claiming its Qwen3.8-Max model rivals top U.S. systems on coding and reasoning benchmarks while offering far cheaper costs per token.

Ride-hailing giant Uber has publicly acknowledged building on Chinese open models, drawing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers who have opened inquiries into the practice over national security concerns. Coinbase has also made the switch, cutting its AI spending by nearly half after moving to Chinese models GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7, even as its overall AI usage increased.

Price is the driving factor across the board with analysts at Citi finding Chinese models can charge as little as 18 cents per million tokens versus roughly $4 on average for top-tier competitors based in the U.S.

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