Data compiled by Woofun AI shows that American developers and startups are accelerating the adoption of Chinese AI models, including DeepSeek, Minimax, and Kimi, to significantly reduce operating costs. The high cost-effectiveness of these models in handling common tasks like code writing has driven a rapid increase in market share. Specifically, DeepSeek's token usage share on the Vercel platform surged from less than 1% to 17% in May.

Concurrently, Microsoft is exploring the deployment of DeepSeek or other open-source models as a low-cost alternative for Copilot.

However, despite the price-driven popularity of Chinese AI models, many US companies and developers access them indirectly through local servers or American cloud service providers. This indirect access is constrained by domestic political scrutiny and data security concerns. Consequently, Chinese AI companies face a paradox where high usage rates fail to translate into substantial direct revenue or long-term enterprise-level customer trust in the US market.