Open-weight AI models developed by Chinese teams such as DeepSeek, Qwen, and Doubao now account for over 60% of token usage on platforms like OpenRouter, yet nearly all revenue flows to American inference providers. OpenAI generates roughly $40 billion in annual recurring revenue, while Anthropic has surpassed $6.5 billion, compared to just a few hundred million at most for all Chinese model companies combined. This paradoxical situation stems from the open-weight model economics: free by design, they allow American companies to access cutting-edge AI capabilities at lower cost, while value creation is captured downstream by inference providers charging for compute and API access.
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