Chinese AI Models Surpass US Counterparts in Weekly Usage
Chinese artificial intelligence models have outpaced their United States counterparts in weekly token usage for six consecutive weeks, dominating the global rankings, according to recent figures disclosed by foreign media.
According to the National Business Daily’s report published on June 8, 2026, data from the monitoring platform OpenRouter indicates a significant shift in the global AI landscape.
During the first week of June 2026, global AI model usage reached 36.1 trillion tokens, marking a 13.5% week-on-week increase. Chinese AI models accounted for 14.19 trillion tokens, surging 27.49% from the previous week. In contrast, US models recorded 3.2 trillion tokens, experiencing a 24.53% decline. This divergence has solidified China's position at the forefront of global AI token consumption.
The report highlighted that four of the world's top five most-used models are developed by Chinese tech firms. DeepSeek-V4-Flash, developed by DeepSeek, maintained its first-place position for a third week with 3.69 trillion tokens. It was closely followed by the Hy3 preview model from Tencent. Newly launched models also performed strongly, with MiniMaxM3 by MiniMax and MiMo-V2.5 by Xiaomi securing the third and fourth spots, respectively.
Conversely, formerly dominant models like Anthropic's Claude series saw notable declines, with Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7 falling out of the top five. The report also noted the volatility of price-driven demand, as Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5-Pro dropped out of the top rankings shortly after a brief usage spike triggered by aggressive price cuts.
Moving forward, the sustained dominance of Chinese models in raw usage volume suggests a rapidly maturing domestic AI ecosystem. As developers increasingly adopt these platforms, the intensifying competition is likely to drive further innovations in context handling and multimodal capabilities, potentially reshaping global AI market dynamics.
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