For the first time, the five most-used models on OpenRouter are all Chinese
OpenRouter's weekly usage ranking for July 20–26 puts Chinese models in all top five spots for the first time. Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5 leads with 10.5 trillion tokens routed in a week, ahead of DeepSeek V4 Flash (6.37T), Tencent's Hunyuan Hy3 (3.94T — up more than 999% since its early-July open-sourcing), Zhipu's GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro. Chinese-origin models now carry over 60% of the platform's roughly 20-trillion-token weekly traffic, and state broadcaster CCTV amplified the milestone this weekend.
Why it mattersOpenRouter measures price-sensitive open-market traffic, not the direct enterprise API business where Claude and GPT still dominate — so this is a leading indicator of where cost-conscious developers go, not total market share. The signal is still stark: cheap open-weight Chinese models are becoming default infrastructure for a growing share of the world's AI applications.
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
China's top model now trails America's by three percent.2026-10-06Banks now take Nvidia chips as collateral on Asian data centre loans.
2026-10-06ChatGPT is signing its fake cartoons with real cartoonists' names.
2026-10-06Qualcomm will license Huawei's way of stacking two chip wafers.
2026-10-06Wikipedia's owner says OpenAI agents may have caused a May outage.
2026-10-06