AI race splits in two as China wages open-weight insurgency

Chinese labs like Moonshot AI are cornering the market for cheap, customizable intelligence, threatening to turn America's prestige models into expensive niche products. On OpenRouter, Chinese models now occupy the top five spots by weekly token usage. All five models from Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax and Z.ai are open-weight, allowing users to download and customize them.