The AI industry is shifting toward open source models as companies face spiraling costs from proprietary providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Speaking at the UN’s AI for Good summit on July 10, 2026, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels stated, “We see a shift happening between the cheaper open source models and the bigger expensive models.” Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months and spent roughly half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to cap AI usage. Vogels noted, “Cost is a very important part of your architecture,” adding that the highest-end model is not always necessary. Open source models can be downloaded for free, with main costs from cloud computing. According to data from OpenRouter, Chinese open source models can be 60% to 90% cheaper than leading Anthropic and OpenAI alternatives. The share of tokens used by U.S. companies on Chinese AI models via OpenRouter climbed as high as 46%, up from an average of 11% over the prior 12 months. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton stated that every company with high inference expenses has a “vital existential project” pushing them toward open-weight models. Ollama, an open-source AI developer tool, now counts nearly 9 million monthly active users and sits in 85% of the Fortune 500.