Some Chinese AI Models Are 90% Cheaper Than US Counterparts

According to foreign media reports, as leading US AI vendors continue to raise their model prices, Chinese large language models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding their adoption among US enterprises, driven by their superior cost-effectiveness. Industry insiders point out that the technical performance gap between some top Chinese open-source and open-weight models and leading US frontier models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic is currently about six to nine months. However, Chinese models are priced 60% to 90% lower and are capable of handling the vast majority of routine AI tasks, making them highly favored by US businesses.