Ramp Report: To save costs, many American companies are directly purchasing the official Chinese DeepSeek API

According to Beating Monitoring, the U.S. expense management platform Ramp released a June 2026 report showing that the Chinese AI company DeepSeek topped the list of popular software. Although the U.S. government previously took a high level of precaution against Chinese large-scale models, actual commercial transaction data reveals the opposite situation. Ramp analyzed credit card spending records from more than 50,000 businesses on the platform and found that many U.S. companies do not deploy open-source models locally, but instead pay directly for DeepSeek’s official managed API services. This means that a large amount of U.S. companies’ data is being directly sent to and stored on servers located in China.

The real flow of funds stands in stark contrast to the cautious attitude in U.S. society more than a year ago when DeepSeek R1 was first released. At that time, due to concerns about leaks and security, major U.S. corporations and government agencies generally restricted the use of Chinese models. However, facing the high bills for large models such as OpenAI or Anthropic in the U.S., many small and medium-sized enterprises ultimately chose to bend to cost pressures and directly purchase official managed services hosted in China to reduce expenses.

In addition to using DeepSeek directly, U.S. companies have also begun to break down their AI spending more carefully, gradually shifting from OpenAI and Anthropic to open-source ecosystems. Inference platforms that provide open-source model API calls, such as Fireworks AI, fal AI, and DeepInfra, have all made the lists. Many companies have started adopting intelligent traffic-splitting strategies—calling expensive OpenAI or Anthropic flagship models only for the most complex tasks, while assigning most day-to-day routine tasks to cheaper open-source models.

The market once worried that AI agents would replace traditional software design tools, but actual data shows that design software remains strong. In this month’s rankings, design tool Figma topped the fastest-growing list, and the collaborative design tool Paper also made the popularity list, indicating that traditional design software is still firmly entrenched on the enterprise side.