Global businesses shift to China's low-cost AI models as US prices soar

A sharp narrowing of the performance gap between American and Chinese AI models is driving global businesses to adopt cheaper, open-weight alternatives from China. Since mid-June, daily token volume of Zhipu's GLM-5.2—which costs about one-fifth of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8—surged 50-fold on Vercel, a San Francisco-based cloud platform for AI web development. Open-weight models now account for 29% of token volume on Vercel's AI Gateway, nearly tripling their share since April. These free-to-download models allow companies to run AI on local hardware without premium cloud subscriptions, forcing a re-evaluation of tech spending as the capability gap with proprietary US models narrows rapidly.