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UBS says about 60% of big companies are slowing AI spending.

Rohan Paul Twitter · Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) · 2026-07-01

UBS reports that roughly 60% of large enterprises are slowing AI spending as CFOs demand clearer ROI, a trend that could shift volume toward cheaper Chinese and open-source models at the expense of OpenAI and Anthropic's usage-based revenue.

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Topics: enterprise-ai-spendingchinese-ai-modelsopen-source-aiai-market-dynamics

Claims

  • Approximately 60% of large companies are slowing AI spending according to UBS, as executives add guardrails and cut tools.
  • Chinese AI models are up to 50 times cheaper than American counterparts on a per-token basis, according to JP Morgan research.
  • Chinese firms accounted for over 45% of all traffic on the AI aggregation platform OpenRouter by April 2026, up from under 2% in late 2024.
  • The emerging enterprise discipline centers on routing tasks to cheaper models without sacrificing output quality.
  • U.S. export controls on chips unintentionally accelerated China's open AI ecosystem by pushing Chinese developers toward open LLM projects.

Key quotes

Enterprise AI is leaving its trial phase and becoming an engineering budget problem.
Open-source and Chinese models could gain share when tasks need cost control over peak reasoning.
Chinese firms accounted for over 45% of all traffic on the AI aggregation platform OpenRouter by April 2026, up from under 2% in late 2024.