Chinese government officials and industry experts say the country’s open source AI ecosystem is gaining recognition among overseas users for its broader, fairer access to high-performance AI technology at lower costs, and China is stepping up its push for a more open, inclusive and collaborative approach to artificial intelligence.
“China stands ready to work with all parties to establish a globally interoperable AI governance system that considers the interests of all parties and promotes beneficial, safe and fair AI development,” said Industry and Information Technology Minister Li Lecheng, who attended the first session of the United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, Switzerland, last week.
By attaching great importance to both AI development and governance, the country has supported the world’s first resolution on AI standardization, collaborated with international partners on more than 120 AI standards, and contributed practical experience to global intelligent transformation, Li said.
He added that China will continue to contribute to closing the global AI gap by supporting fair and inclusive development and especially helping countries in the Global South build AI technologies and services.
Matthias Gavrish, senior director of ecosystem development at Global Communications Alliance GTI, said during the conference that China has provided “valuable practical experience to the world” with widespread AI applications in agriculture, healthcare, and public services.
“More importantly, China’s open source models, such as DeepSeek, will give researchers, startups, and public institutions around the world access to high-performance AI at low cost. This is a real contribution to the global public good,” he said.
Pan Helin, a member of the Information and Communication Economic Expert Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, recently said in an interview with China Daily that the growing international appeal of China’s AI models is driven by their improved capabilities, competitive pricing, and open-source nature.
“The gap between AI models made by China and the US is rapidly closing. China’s significant cost advantage is increasingly offsetting the remaining performance gap. In some areas, such as video generation models, Chinese developers are already outperforming their foreign competitors,” Pan added.
According to OpenRouter, a platform widely used by developers to access AI models, as of Sunday, the number of weekly application programming interface calls for Chinese large-scale language models exceeded calls for US-developed LLMs for 11 consecutive weeks, putting China in the top spot globally.
Since February 8, more than 30% of the weekly tokens used by US companies on the platform are related to Chinese AI models, with the share reaching 46%. Tokens are small units of data that are processed by AI models during training and inference. In contrast, the share in the first half of 2025 was only 4.5%.
“Users around the world, whether individuals or businesses, are validating China’s AI development path through real-world adoption. This will further strengthen the global application ecosystem of China’s AI models,” Pan said.
Many overseas companies are already turning to China’s LLMs as a more cost-effective option to implement advanced AI.
In late June, Brian Armstrong, CEO of crypto platform Coinbase, shared on social media that the company added two Chinese-made LLMs as default models for its engineering team, cutting AI spending by nearly half of its peak.
That same month, AI startup Lindy announced it had migrated all traffic from Anthropic’s Claude to DeepSeek-V4.
“[This]will save us millions of dollars and actually see performance improvements in many key use cases.[This]is transformational for businesses,” Lindy CEO Flo Crivello wrote on social media.
