When you’re trying to figure out how to use Claude and GPT, people in the US may be trying to use more DeepSeek instead.

A well-known AI routing service provider, @OpenRouter, analyzed token call data from several thousand US companies from January 2025 to June 2026.
The results show that in early 2025, the share of tokens used by US companies for Chinese models was below 5%. By April 2026, that figure surged to 46%.
Almost half.
Over a span of a year and a half, US companies have gone from “barely using Chinese models” to “nearly half of call volume goes to Chinese models.”
And during the same period, the difficulty for Chinese users to access US models has only increased, not decreased 🤡.