Chinese AI Models Dominate OpenRouter's Top 5

OpenRouter's latest weekly ranking shows the top five AI models by usage are all from Chinese companies. Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5 leads with 10.5 trillion tokens used in a week, up 12% from last week and six times more than two months ago. DeepSeek's two models rank second and fifth, covering different developer needs. Tencent's Hunyuan Hy3 is third, growing over 999% weekly since its open-source release on July 6.

Open-source strategies are helping Chinese models gain global influence. Hugging Face data shows Chinese open-source models have the highest total downloads worldwide, with the Qwen series leading by over 1 billion downloads. U.S. investment data reveals that 80% of American AI startups use Chinese open-source models in fundraising pitches, and over 200 derivative models emerge daily based on Chinese models. Experts say open source doesn't mean giving up revenue; companies can profit through cloud inference, model fine-tuning, and other services.