China AI is winning the cheaper layer.
U S companies are now sending 30%+ of their OpenRouter tokens to Chinese AI models every week.
The reason is Price.
A similar workload reportedly costs:
Claude — $4,811 ChatGPT — $3,357 Zhipu GLM — $544 And Chinese models are getting closer in capability too.
But here's the twist:
Open-weight models make up 29% of Vercel's tokens, but less than 4% of spending.
The US still dominates the premium AI market.
China may be winning the cheap layer. And that could become a serious problem for Western software companies.