Shanghai AI Models Surge in Global Popularity

Chinese AI developers have reached a significant milestone in global rankings, specifically on the OpenRouter platform. During the week ending March 8, usage of Chinese-developed models spiked by 35 percent, reaching a total of 4.2 trillion tokens and overtaking their counterparts from the US.

The open-source testing ground OpenClaw recently saw three Chinese models sweep the top of its leaderboard: Step 3.5 Flash, developed by Shanghai-based StepFun, ranked first, followed by Kimi K2.5 and MiniMax M2.5.

Experts suggest that developers in Shanghai are succeeding by prioritizing agility and AI agent integration over trying to match the massive scale of general-purpose models from major US tech companies.

Cost-efficiency is another primary driver. For example, MiniMax's M2.5 costs approximately 30 US cents per million input tokens, a stark contrast to the roughly US$5 charged by some top-tier models from the US.