Global AI Price War Intensifies as Chinese Models Seize Share, Korean Media Report
Global AI competition is shifting from performance to price, and Chinese models are seizing share, Korean media reported via CNMO on October 19. OpenRouter data for October 5-11 showed Chinese models took about 48% of all AI task requests, ahead of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic combined at 40.3%; by company, DeepSeek led at 24.5%, Zhipu AI at 13.4% and Alibaba's Qwen at 5.4%. DeepSeek's October 17 V4.1 Flash-1017 beat OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 on coding, reasoning and agent tasks, scoring 77.0 on DeepSWE v1.1, while its enterprise price of 0.15 dollars per million input tokens is more than 20 times cheaper than U.S. high-performance models. Pressured, OpenAI launched low-cost GPT-6 Luna at about 0.10 dollars per million tokens in September and Anthropic followed with Claude Haiku 5.5, while Google temporarily halved its top-model price.
Source: CNMO Technology, Oct 19, 2026 | 2026-10-19
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