According to a research report released by CLSA, Chinese AI models accounted for approximately 65% of token usage on the OpenRouter platform in September and 30% of dollar spending, benefiting from roughly 80% price discounts compared to US peers, with lower pricing driving usage-based revenue growth, consistent with the Jevons Paradox.

CLSA's research report noted that OpenRouter data shows rapidly growing demand for AI models, with weekly token consumption exceeding 146 trillion as of the end of September, and combined annual recurring revenue (ARR) for models surpassing US$1.5 billion.

The firm stated that OpenAI recorded the largest increase in spending share, while among Chinese providers, Z.AI (02513) led, followed by DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Z.AI's progress on AWS Bedrock could be a key indicator of the monetization potential of open-weight models.

The report pointed out that in September, top models from US and Chinese large language model providers accounted for 31% and 65% of token consumption respectively, a marked shift from 65% and 22% in January; in terms of dollar spending, US and Chinese providers accounted for 70% and 30% respectively in September, compared with 94% and 6% in January.

Weekly spending on Chinese models has risen 27-fold year-to-date, driven by a 67-fold increase in token usage, while blended token prices have nearly halved.

The firm estimates that OpenAI recorded the largest increase in OpenRouter spending share, with its weekly spending share rising 20 percentage points year-to-date to 27%, closing in on Anthropic's 28%.

Among Chinese providers, for the week ending September 27, Z.AI, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI led in spending share at 10.5%, 7.1% and 3.9% respectively, while Tencent (00700) also recorded 3.9% benefiting from its Hy4 preview version. Open-weight models accounted for 29% of revenue share, highlighting monetization opportunities for Chinese labs distributing through computing partners. Z.AI's GLM 5.3 progress on AWS Bedrock remains a key signal for potential revenue and margin upgrades.