Chinese Private-Sector AI Models Win Global Fans; Weekly Token Calls 4.5 Times U.S.
Chinese private-enterprise AI models are winning global fans through clusters of open and low-cost large models, China News Service reported on October 19. Aggregator OpenRouter said Chinese models' weekly token calls have led the United States for 24 straight weeks; in the week of October 5-11, of 172 trillion tokens called globally, Chinese models accounted for 86.74 trillion, 4.5 times the U.S., and the top five models worldwide were all Chinese private models. The appeal rests on cost-performance: Kimi K3 charges 3 dollars input and 15 dollars output per million tokens versus Anthropic's Claude at 10 and 50 dollars, while DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs a fraction. A Stanford 2026 AI Index report said the gap between the best U.S. and Chinese models was only 2.7% as of March 2026, and Intel's CEO noted Chinese frontier models are cheap, good and fast-adopted.
Source: China News Service, Oct 19, 2026 | 2026-10-19
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