Major Western companies are switching to Chinese artificial intelligence models to rein in technology costs, the Financial Times reported, with US food-delivery giant DoorDash, travel-rental platform Airbnb and Germany's Siemens among the names moving workloads to Chinese models. US investment-sector data cited in the report suggest as many as 80 percent of American AI startups now use Chinese open-source models in their fundraising demos.
Cost is the headline driver: Chinese frontier models typically price 60 to 90 percent below the top offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, according to OpenRouter data quoted by CNBC. Performance is no longer the trade-off — Stanford's 2026 AI Index puts the gap between the best US and Chinese models in the low single digits, and Intel's chief executive recently said models like DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM are "good enough" for real workloads while NVIDIA's Jensen Huang has repeatedly praised Chinese open models for lowering the barrier to AI adoption worldwide.
Chinese models are also reaching mainstream entertainment: the first season of Amazon's hit series "House of David" used Chinese video-generation model Kling AI for part of its 72 AI-assisted shots, letting producers compress four to five months of work into weeks. In Southeast Asia and Africa, governments and developers are building on Chinese open models for multilingual, low-compute scenarios that Western models have historically underserved.
Source: Financial Times/CNBC/China News Service roundup, October 20, 2026
