Cost Pressure Drives Major US Companies to Chinese AI Models

Coinbase, Airbnb, Uber and others are adopting Chinese AI models—including DeepSeek, GLM 5.2, and Kimi 2.7—to reduce inference costs as spending on OpenAI and Anthropic strains budgets. Open-weight distribution lets firms self-host models, bypassing API gating. The shift accelerated through 2026 on the OpenRouter platform. Enterprise procurement is outpacing policy restrictions on both sides of the Pacific.