Chinese AI models surpass American ones in token volume on OpenRouter for the first time
In mid-February, Chinese artificial intelligence models overtook American ones in token volume on OpenRouter — the largest API aggregator for language models. During the week of February 16 to 22, total token consumption by Chinese models rose to 5.16 trillion, a 127% increase from the start of the month, while the American models’ token volume fell to 2.7 trillion.
According to platform statistics, four out of the top five positions were held by models from Chinese companies. The OpenRouter leaderboard is led by MiniMax M2.5 and Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot AI). GLM-5 from Zhipu AI and V3.2 from DeepSeek also made the top five. The only non-Chinese model in the list was Gemini 3 Flash Preview from Google DeepMind.
This trend highlights the rapid rise of Chinese AI vendors in the global language model market and could shape the industry’s future, fostering new opportunities and competition.
