Chinese AI models now handle roughly 40% of all tokens processed on OpenRouter, the world's largest model-routing platform, up from under 2% in late 2024, according to the article. The shift is visible in data from Oxford-affiliated Our World in Data, based on OpenRouter's production usage. Chinese AI companies held five models in the platform's daily top-50 rankings at the start of 2025; by May 2026, that count had grown to 20, a 300% increase. OpenRouter routes live developer API traffic across more than 400 models from over 60 providers for more than 8 million users, roughly 47% of them American. Programming workloads grew from roughly 11% of total OpenRouter token volume at the start of 2025 to more than 50% by mid-2026. By April 2026, Chinese-developed models collectively processed more than 45% of all tokens on the platform. In February 2026, Chinese AI models overtook American models in weekly API call volume on OpenRouter for the first time, processing an estimated 5.16 trillion tokens versus 2.7 trillion from US providers. The article notes that the open-weights license on GLM-5.2 does not protect against China's National Intelligence Law for teams that cannot self-host the model's 1.5-terabyte weights.