Chinese AI models gain ground with U.S. companies as costs rise

Chinesebuilt AI models are being adopted more widely by U.S. companies as businesses look for lowercost alternatives to leading American systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. The shift is being driven by rising model usage costs and the growing performance of Chinese open source and open weight models such as DeepSeek and Z.ai. According to platforms that track developer usage, the share of tokens routed to Chinese models has increased sharply in recent months. Companies said these models can handle many common enterprise tasks at a fraction of the price, even if top U.S. models still lead on the most demanding workloads. The trend is also drawing attention from U.S. regulators as competition intensifies in the global AI market.