US companies shift workloads to Chinese models as token prices plunge
Justgototheeffinmoon · reddit · 2026-07-27
Fortune’s reporting, as summarized here, says large US companies are pushing more work to Chinese AI models because the economics are hard to ignore.
- Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong reportedly said AI spending was cut in half after shifting employees to Moonshot’s Kimi and Z.ai’s GLM.
- DoorDash’s CTO Andy Fang said lower-level work goes to Kimi because it is cheaper and better on quality.
- Airbnb’s Brian Chesky previously said customer service runs on Alibaba’s Qwen for similar reasons.
The post argues the real story is pricing power, not leaderboard rankings:
- Anthropic’s Fable is quoted at about $50 per 1M output tokens.
- DeepSeek-V4-Pro is said to cost about $0.87 per 1M.
- Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 is about $4.40 per 1M.
- Moonshot’s Kimi K3 is listed at $15 per 1M.
It also cites OpenRouter data showing Chinese models took 57% of tokens used by US firms in one July week, with six of the top ten and all of the top five model slots coming from Chinese labs. The post claims Nvidia lost nearly $600B in market value after K3’s release and briefly ceded the world’s most valuable-company spot to Apple.
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