A CNBC investigation published July 7 found that the share of OpenRouter tokens sent by US companies to Chinese models had remained above 30% each week since February 8. The series reached roughly 46% at its peak, compared with an 11% average a year earlier.
Price is a major contributor.
| Model | Input price / 1M tokens |
|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.14 |
| GPT-5.5 | $5.00 |
OpenRouter told CNBC that Chinese open models can be 60% to 90% cheaper than leading Anthropic and OpenAI offerings. Lindy said it moved traffic from Claude to DeepSeek and expects the switch to save millions of dollars. Those examples show substantial cost pressure, without establishing capability parity across every workload.
Token share and revenue share measure different things, and OpenRouter represents one gateway rather than the whole enterprise market. Its data documents a material routing shift among US companies using that platform.
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