# Chinese AI models gain ground with U.S. companies as OpenAI and Anthropic costs surge

> US companies are increasingly turning to Chinese open-weight models such as DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi, according to CNBC, as the cost of frontier systems from OpenAI and Anthropic keeps climbing. The draw is straightforward: these Chinese models can run 60 to 90 percent cheaper, and for routine, non-critical tasks that price gap is proving hard to ignore. The deeper shift is in how buyers now choose. Rather than defaulting to the best-known brand, teams are evaluating models on production metrics like cost per token and reliability, and routing lower-stakes work to whatever performs well enough for less. That behavior is steadily pulling token volume away from the top US labs even as those labs keep the highest-value workloads. A wave of new model releases in July has only accelerated the trend. The takeaway is that the AI market is starting to look less like a two-horse race and more like a commodity landscape where price and fit, not prestige, drive the decision.

_Section: [Interesting AI Articles](https://www.wortins.com/articles) · Source: CNBC · Published Saturday, July 18, 2026_

## Wortins' read

US companies are increasingly turning to Chinese open-weight models such as DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi, according to CNBC, as the cost of frontier systems from OpenAI and Anthropic keeps climbing. The draw is straightforward: these Chinese models can run 60 to 90 percent cheaper, and for routine, non-critical tasks that price gap is proving hard to ignore. The deeper shift is in how buyers now choose. Rather than defaulting to the best-known brand, teams are evaluating models on production metrics like cost per token and reliability, and routing lower-stakes work to whatever performs well enough for less. That behavior is steadily pulling token volume away from the top US labs even as those labs keep the highest-value workloads. A wave of new model releases in July has only accelerated the trend. The takeaway is that the AI market is starting to look less like a two-horse race and more like a commodity landscape where price and fit, not prestige, drive the decision.

## Source

[Read the full story at CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/07/chinese-ai-models-costs-us-openai-anthropic.html)

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