As US AI costs soar, global businesses pivot to China’s low-cost, open-weight models

Global businesses are increasingly switching from premium, closed-source US software – such as OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude – to cheaper Chinese open-weight models that offer near-frontier performance. Since mid-June, the daily token volume of Zhipu’s GLM-5.2, which operates at about one-fifth the cost of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, had surged 50-fold on Vercel, the San Francisco-based cloud platform for AI web development reported on Tuesday. Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s V4 Flash, a...