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Driven by a series of new releases, Chinese open-source #Artificial Intelligence models topped global token usage this month on AI hosting platform OpenRouter, ending a year of market dominance by US developers.
MiniMax AI and Moonshot AI led the OpenRouter's latest ranking, reflecting increased international demand for open-source #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 models on its site.
Launched around two weeks ago, the M2.5 from Shanghai-based MiniMax emerged as the most popular AI model by token usage so far this month, according to OpenRouter, which found 4.55 trillion tokens used on the M2.5 model by developers via its platform.
A token is the fundamental unit of data input – includingwhole words, parts of words, characters or punctuation marks – that an AI model processes to generate output.
Released last month, Kimi K2.5 from Beijing-headquartered Moonshot was ranked second with 4.02 trillion tokens used by #(Cool) Dev on OpenRouter.
The rest of OpenRouter’s top-five ranking included Google DeepMind’s Gemini 3 Flash Preview, V3.2 from Hangzhou-based DeepSeek and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5.
MiniMax, Moonshot and DeepSeek accounted for nearly two thirds of the total token usage among the top five models ranked this month, according to OpenRouter.
The heightened AI arms race between the US and China intensified ahead of the Chinese New Year holiday, when major developers – including Alibaba Cloud, Moonshot, MiniMax and Zhipu AI – rushed to release their most advanced models to wide acclaim. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Chinese AI models have also seen rising token usage in their home market, according to a February report by consultancy Frost & Sullivan, as more enterprises adopted these systems to raise efficiency across their operations.
Chinese enterprises’ average daily token usage reached 37 trillion in the second half of 2025, up 263 per cent from 10.2 trillion in the first half of the year, the report showed.
https://www.scmp.com/tech..
