Chinese AI Models Capture 60% of OpenRouter Traffic

OpenRouter, a neutral routing platform, reports that Chinese AI models now capture over 60% of its traffic, a sharp reversal from a year ago when U.S. models held roughly 70%. Xiaomi's MiMo V2.5 currently ranks first by token volume, while Alibaba's Qwen family has surpassed Meta's Llama as the most downloaded open model family globally. Meta's routed volume has fallen below 1%.

This shift is driven by radical cost efficiency rather than absolute frontier capabilities. DeepSeek's V4-Pro is priced at approximately one-twelfth the cost of GPT-5.5. While American labs still lead in reasoning and long-horizon agents, they are losing the distribution battle. Anthropic captures roughly half of the platform's total spending despite holding only 12% of the token share.

The resulting market bifurcation has created a death zone for AI strategies that are neither the most capable nor the cheapest. This trend has prompted calls for the U.S. to release more frontier-class open-weight models to counter Chinese ecosystem lock-in and distribution dominance.