Reuters: Chinese models charge as little as 18 cents per million tokens versus $4 average for top models, says CitiBank …
Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-06-30
Citibank Research finds Chinese AI models price as low as $0.18 per million tokens versus a $4 frontier-model average, driving open-source processing on OpenRouter from 34% to 65% in five months and forcing OpenAI and Anthropic into a cost competition they were not designed to win.
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Extraction
Topics: ai-pricingchinese-modelsenterprise-aiopen-source-llmai-market-competition
Claims
- Chinese AI models charge as little as $0.18 per million tokens versus a $4 average for top frontier models, according to Citibank Research.
- Open-source model processing on OpenRouter grew from 34% in January 2026 to 65% in June 2026, driven significantly by Chinese model adoption.
- Gartner estimates AI coding costs will surpass the average developer salary by 2028, making cost control a strategic priority.
- Enterprise model selection has shifted from a capability contest to a cost-control problem as usage-based pricing makes AI bills materially large.
- OpenAI and Anthropic face structural price pressure as enterprises evaluate models task-by-task rather than defaulting to the most capable option.
Key quotes
Chinese models charge as little as 18 cents per million tokens versus $4 average for top models, says CitiBank Research.
Open-source processing on OpenRouter rose to 65% in June from 34% in January.
Cheaper AI has become the new enterprise priority as usage-based bills turn model choice from a capability contest into a cost-control problem.