American AI startups are routing far more app traffic to Chinese LLMs.

Through OpenRouter, weekly token consumption was mostly driven by U.S. models through much of 2025. But from early 2026, Chinese models suddenly became the main growth engine.

AI model market is becoming less about brand loyalty and more about raw utility.

@nxthompson OpenRouter doesn't really make sense for US models, you can use Anthropic/OpenAI/Azure/AWS directly for that. So I wouldn't read much into the US/Chinese ratio on OpenRouter.

@nxthompson It is quite disappointing to see that the US 'Big 3' currently hold only a 35% market share. In my view, Gemma 4 31B has come the closest to rivaling the Chinese models. To capitalize on this, Google needs to make a much stronger effort to deploy and promote it through gCloud.

@nxthompson OpenRouter is not a representative sample. It's mostly prosumers/solo devs, so biases heavily towards not just Chinese models but, e.g., DeepSeek Flash (not Pro). At companies, people are not just using Claude/GPT, but, e.g., Opus (not Sonnet). So literally the opposite.

@nxthompson Who actually supplies tokens for Chinese models

@nxthompson What could go wrong with speaking to the commies about proprietary stuff? Retards.

@nxthompson OpenRouter is where price-elastic builds live. The chart mostly shows where developers go when cost is the variable. Frontier usage doesn't clear the same channel. The barbell's showing up in the data. Thread:

@nxthompson CCP subsidy program working as intended.

@nxthompson This data is only for people accessing models through OpenRouter. ie: it's self-selected for queries that aren't using Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT directly. I'm more likely to use Chinese models through something like OpenRouter, too, because I wouldn't want to use them directly.

@nxthompson Why are you assuming this is representative of the token consumption of American AI startups? Seems like a crazy jump to make...

@nxthompson @grok which Chinese model is used most currently ?

@nxthompson Mirrors Chinese car production graph.

While I don’t disagree that Chinese models are gaining traction I think it’s worth mentioning that users tend to use individual platform APIs (Anthropic / OpenAI/ Google) when using closed models because there’s no cost advantage to using open router for those. So the conclusion here is that Chinese OPEN SOURCE models are beating us ones - which isn’t surprising given that Meta changed its strategy with Llama

@nxthompson Only like 20% of users buy iphones but aapl is worlds largest phone co

@nxthompson It doesnt say "among American AI startups" anywhere on here.

@nxthompson What makes you believe startups are using openrouter ? I use openrouter for my personal use… but no way is it touching my business

@nxthompson Think of the cost efficiency per token of American models for most developers or startups? It's just not worth it.

@rohanpaul_ai so the american AI startups built the moat then realized the moat had a cheaper toll booth on the other side. classic move honestly

@nxthompson When you don't have unlimited money you have to use the most cost efficient solution. It's like why doesn't everyone drive a Porche to work over a Toyota. Both get you from point a go b. One is slightly faster. But it's not necessary

@nxthompson We are very early in the cycle but the Chinese models are there to stay, But we might see a case where Chinese models get the volume while the US models capture the profits!!