Chinese open weight AI models now handle almost a third of all enterprise AI traffic on one major platform

[Kev5]

Open weight AI models, many built by Chinese companies, processed 29 percent of all AI tokens routed through cloud platform Vercel's production gateway in June, up sharply from roughly one ninth of total volume back in April, according to Vercel's latest AI Gateway Production Index. Despite handling nearly a third of all traffic, these models accounted for less than 4 percent of total spending, reflecting costs roughly a tenth of the platform average

DeepSeek was the biggest beneficiary of the shift, capturing 22.6 percent of token volume in June, making it the third largest provider on the gateway behind only Anthropic and Google, and closing to within two percentage points of Google's slipping second place position. Vercel's head of agentic infrastructure Harpreet Arora summed up the dynamic simply, when a task doesn't need the best model available, teams are increasingly routing it to the cheapest one that's good enough, and the recent wave of Chinese models is winning that particular trade

Overall AI investment kept climbing through June, with token volume up 29 percent and spending up 27 percent, but unlike the prior month average cost per token barely moved, since the rapid growth of cheaper open weight workloads was offset almost exactly by roughly 12 percent higher pricing on leading closed weight frontier models

Revenue tells a very different story from raw token volume though. The four leading US frontier AI companies still captured 95 percent of total spending through the gateway in June. Anthropic alone took 61 percent of spending while processing only 32 percent of tokens, holding its strongest position in higher stakes applications like coding assistants and back office automation where organizations still prioritize accuracy over cost. Specialization is also emerging by content type, Anthropic leads text generation, OpenAI holds the largest image generation share at over half of all images produced, and in video specifically, Chinese developers dominate the premium segment, with ByteDance's Seedance capturing nearly half of all video related spending. Arora noted that privacy protections and data residency requirements remain a key sticking point for customers still weighing whether to adopt open weight models in production

Chinese Open Weight Ai Models Gaining Ground As Enterprise Adoption Accelerates Reportwww.computing.co.uk

[Connor97]

29 percent of token volume for under 4 percent of spending is such a clean illustration of exactly what price to performance routing actually looks like in practice at scale

[SerialScroller60]

Anthropic capturing 61 percent of spending while only processing 32 percent of tokens shows how much of a premium the market is still willing to pay for trust in higher stakes applications specifically