Chinese models route four times US volume on OpenRouter as DeepSeek jumps 801%

Chinese AI models are handling roughly four times the routed volume of their US counterparts on OpenRouter, according to data published by Dealroom, with DeepSeek's usage up 801%.

OpenRouter functions as a router for model choice: applications call many vendors' models through one interface and pay per token. Share shifts there track production traffic more closely than vendor-reported benchmark scores do.

Price is the obvious mechanism. Chinese open-weight models have generally been priced below comparable closed models, and a router reduces switching to a configuration change, collapsing migration cost to near zero.

The caveat is scope. Router traffic skews toward third-party apps and individual developers, while enterprises running their own inference clusters stay invisible in these figures. Four times describes the observable slice of the market, not all AI usage.

Concentration cuts both ways. The same ease of switching that built these numbers can reverse them quickly if a model runs into reliability problems or regulatory scrutiny.

Read as a trend rather than a verdict, the data points to two questions: whether DeepSeek's growth holds up on dimensions other than price, and whether US vendors respond with cuts or with agent capabilities strong enough to pull the traffic back.

For now the scoreboard is denominated in tokens and invoices rather than leaderboard points. That is a harder test to game, and a more honest one for buyers deciding what to run in production.