Chinese Models Lead "OpenRouter" for 23rd Consecutive Week

Data from the "OpenRouter" platform for the period from September 28 to October 4 showed that total model usage globally reached 166 trillion tokens, an increase of 13.69% from the previous week, while the usage of Chinese models reached 57.46 trillion tokens compared to 16.2 trillion tokens for US models.

This marks the 23rd consecutive week in which Chinese models lead their US counterparts, according to platform data cited by the Chinese platform "Guandian," continuing a dominance that began months ago on the same platform and has not waned.

Four of the top five most used models globally were Chinese, led by an anonymous model known as "Taikong Tu" with a weekly growth of 179%, followed by the "DeepSeek V4.1 Flash" model with 25.6 trillion tokens, up 31%, and then the "Zhipu GLM5.3 Flash" model with 9.73 trillion tokens. These figures indicate that the largest share of usage is concentrated in a limited number of models.

This ongoing lead reflects the growing reliance on low-cost Chinese models in daily-use applications, an indicator closely watched by developers and investors in the Arab region when selecting models to build their services on, as usage costs directly affect project viability.

What do these terms mean?

Token: A small unit of measurement processed by an AI model, roughly equivalent to part of a word. OpenRouter: A platform allowing developers to access multiple AI models through a single interface. Market Share: The percentage of the total market captured by a product. Open-source Model: A model whose code is made available for public use and modification.