Cheap, capable, and controversial: why US companies cannot resist Chinese AI models

Artificial intelligence adoption accelerated sharply across enterprises in 2026, but soaring usage costs are prompting many businesses to rethink their technology choices. This has driven growing interest in Chinese-developed AI models that offer comparable capabilities at a fraction of the price. As companies expand AI deployments across software development, customer service and workflow automation, many are discovering that usage-based pricing has made AI bills far more unpredictable than initially expected. While the price of individual AI tokens has generally declined, the overall cost of completing increasingly complex tasks has risen as AI providers move away from flat subscription models toward consumption-based pricing. The mounting costs are encouraging developers, startups and even larger enterprises to experiment with lower-cost open-source models, many...