Companies turn to Chinese AI models to cut costs

{"text":[[{"start":9.25,"text":"Companies from Silicon Valley to Europe are turning to Chinese AI models as they try to cut the cost of using the technology and reduce their dependence on US frontier labs. "}],[{"start":19.85,"text":"DoorDash, Siemens and Airbnb are among the groups that have adopted AI tools built in China, drawn by models that are cheaper, increasingly capable and, in some cases, easier to run on their own infrastructure."}],[{"start":32.55,"text":"Chinese AI models from groups such as DeepSeek and Z.ai have rapidly overtaken US rivals in token consumption this year, according to OpenRouter, a platform that tracks the units of text, code or data processed by large language models. "}],[{"start":48,"text":"The shift has been driven largely by cost, as companies try to curb ballooning AI bills. But in Europe it has taken on a sharper geopolitical edge after the Trump administration last month imposed export controls on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models, forcing businesses to confront the risks of depending on US technology."}],[{"start":67.7,"text":"Chinese models are “the elephant in the room”, said Eugene Cheah, chief executive and co-founder of Featherless AI. “Enterprises are starting to realise, ‘Hey, we don’t need the best model, we can use the faster, cheaper models’.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":81.65,"text":"DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang said last week that the food delivery group now delegated “lower-level work” to Kimi K2.6, a model by Chinese start-up Moonshot AI, and reserved Anthropic’s Fable for only “the hardest work”. "}],[{"start":96.5,"text":"The new combination “vastly outperform[ed] . . .  at a cheaper cost” than a previous set-up that used only US frontier models from Anthropic, he said on X. "}],[{"start":106,"text":"German engineering group Siemens told the FT it wanted “flexibility” with its AI models. It uses a broad range, including tools from China’s DeepSeek and Z.ai alongside models from US frontier labs and Nvidia as well as French AI group Mistral. "}],[{"start":123.9,"text":"Some companies have gone further, switching entirely to Chinese models. San Francisco-based start-up Lindy has moved from Anthropic’s AI tools to DeepSeek’s V4 model. "}],[{"start":135.25,"text":"Founder Flo Crivello last month on X hailed the shift as “transformative”, saying it had saved the company millions of dollars and improved performance in “many core use cases”."}],[{"start":147.15,"text":"The shift has been accelerated by US-based AI groups including Anthropic and OpenAI moving some enterprise services from flat subscriptions to usage-based billing, which has dramatically increased the cost of using their models. "}],[{"start":160.8,"text":"At the same time, China’s top models have improved, especially on coding tasks. The release in June of Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 was praised by many Silicon Valley technologists and signalled that the gap between US and Chinese models was starting to narrow. "}],[{"start":177.20000000000002,"text":"“Many smart people/AI insiders are saying GLM-5.2 is the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models with no compromises,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of US venture capital group Andreessen Horowitz, in a post on X."}],[{"start":196.20000000000002,"text":"“Enterprises have an incentive to shift some of their workload to cheaper models. Why would you pay a premium for Anthropic, OpenAI models when for a lot of the workloads you need, the Chinese models are generally workable?” said Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology."}],[{"start":215.85000000000002,"text":"Another draw is that many of the leading Chinese AI tools are so-called open-weight models whose parameters are released publicly, meaning they can be hosted on company-managed servers and fine-tuned for specific uses."}],[{"start":229.8,"text":"Airbnb said it used “a limited number of China-origin models” and was able to protect its data and operations by running them “only through approved US-based service providers”."}],[{"start":240.60000000000002,"text":"Proprietary models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude tools are largely accessed through their creators’ systems or third-party enterprise platforms."}],[{"start":250.60000000000002,"text":"The best open-weight models are between 10 and 60 times cheaper than their proprietary equivalents, said Vipul Ved Prakash, chief executive and co-founder of Together AI, a cloud provider that helps companies access these tools."}],[{"start":264.75,"text":"“Companies want to deploy them because they have more control and they can adapt the models to their own data,” he said. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":271.85,"text":"In Europe, companies cite last year’s US trade wars and the export controls on Anthropic’s models as factors in moving away from US AI tools."}],[{"start":281.25,"text":"While the export ban was overturned, it “changed the perception of the market forever,” said Ben Grinnell, chief AI officer at Newton, a UK consultancy firm. “You can put Fable back in the market, but you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”"}],[{"start":297,"text":"Tom Sheridan, US vice-president at venture capital firm RTP Global, said his advice to European start-ups has changed. “For European companies, a self-hosted Chinese model is the most secure choice versus the US one.”"}],[{"start":311.75,"text":"Zoltan Bettenbuk, chief executive officer of German human resources start-up Timebutler, said that about six months ago his business started to offload some tasks from Anthropic’s Claude to Alibaba’s Qwen models in order to reduce its dependence on US frontier labs."}],[{"start":329.1,"text":"“I still rely on the most capable flagship models currently because they do a great job, but if all hell breaks loose, I need to have another plan,” he said."}],[{"start":338.45000000000005,"text":"Platforms offering open-weight models say demand has risen in recent months. "}],[{"start":343.35,"text":"Featherless AI’s Cheah said it had seen “exploding interest” since the US ban on exports of Fable, particularly from Europe. “People came banging on our door.”"}],[{"start":354,"text":"He added that one customer had “origins near the Greenland area”, which the US has threatened to take over. “He was like, ‘I don’t want to build on top of closed models, because who knows what happens with the geopolitics’.”"}],[{"start":366.3,"text":"Aidan Gomez, chief executive of Canadian AI group Cohere, said companies were now realising the importance of sovereign AI for their business. "}],[{"start":376.05,"text":"“The Mythos ban was certainly the most tangible event, and people having their access revoked. It exposes the risk of relying on any one single entity for any of your workloads,” he said. "}],[{"start":389,"text":"“Two years ago the main worry was China. Right now the bigger worry in Europe is the US,” said Per Roman, founder of European venture capital firm Bullhound Capital. “That is staggering.”"}],[{"start":407.75,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783932968_7090.mp3"}