Startups including Airbnb and Social Capital are adopting Chinese models such as Qwen and Kimi K2 as lower prices and narrowing performance gaps broaden their appeal.
Chinese-built AI models are gaining more traction with U.S. companies as startups look for cheaper alternatives to leading domestic systems while seeing less of a trade-off in performance. New signs of adoption now include companies such as Airbnb and Social Capital using Chinese models including Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot's Kimi K2. The cost advantage remains a major driver. Chinese models are described as costing as much as 40 times less than U.S. options, adding to earlier estimates that some Chinese open-source models can be 60% to 90% cheaper than leading offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. The performance gap has also narrowed sharply, helping Chinese models gain visibility in rankings of popular AI tools on platforms such as OpenRouter. Earlier usage data from OpenRouter showed the share of tokens used by U.S. companies on Chinese models stayed above 30% each week since Feb. 8 and reached as high as 46%, versus an average of 11% over the prior 12 months and 4.5% in the first half of 2025. Companies including Lindy, Vercel and LaunchLemonade had already pointed to rising interest in DeepSeek and Z.ai as businesses route more workloads to lower-cost models that are good enough for many tasks. The broader trend underscores mounting pressure on U.S. AI providers such as Anthropic as buyers become more price-sensitive and more willing to mix in foreign models for specific workloads. Market watchers are now focused on whether U.S. firms respond with new products, partnerships or pricing changes, while any shift in U.S.-China tech policy could further reshape adoption patterns.