Switching to DeepSeek V4 saves millions of dollars and increases performance on many core use cases for Lindy, Lindy CEO Flo Crivello wrote in an X post in June, saying that the move is "Transformative for the business."

　　The share of tokens used by US companies on Chinese AI models via OpenRouter - one of the major overseas multi-model aggregation and routing platforms, serving as an important window for observing global LLM usage trends - has sat above 30 percent every week since February 8, with that figure rising as high as 46 percent. The average across the previous 12 months was just 11 percent, falling to 4.5 percent in the first half of 2025, CNBC reported on July 7.

　　A token is the smallest unit of text that an AI LLM reads and processes. It can be a whole word, part of a word, a punctuation mark, or even a single character.

　　Chen Jing, vice president of the Technology and Strategy Research Institute, told the Global Times on Monday that the first half of 2026 marked a turning point. Foreign enterprises" adoption of Chinese LLMs is no longer sporadic but systemic, and while multinational subsidiaries in China prioritize localization, international developers and corporations are actively pursuing cost effectiveness, Chen said.

　　"A key shift has recently emerged: the technical capabilities of Chinese open-source LLMs have advanced rapidly, effectively narrowing the generational gap and pushing practical utility past the critical threshold. Previously, overseas developers shunned Chinese models due to notable performance gaps. Today, however, with some domestic models like DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.2, and Qwen 3.7 narrowing the performance gap to an acceptable range, their overwhelming cost advantage has become impossible to ignore," Chen said.