AI Development21 min readLandscape reportQ2 2026

Chinese AI Models Q2 2026: 10-Provider Landscape Report

Q2 2026 report on 10 Chinese AI providers, from Xiaomi and Qwen to DeepSeek and Kimi: OpenRouter token share, list prices, licenses and enterprise fit.

Digital Applied Team
April 12, 2026• Updated October 21, 2026
21 min read
Corrected October 21, 2026

We rechecked this report against archived OpenRouter data and vendor documentation. The Chinese token share is now stated as the 59.6% its own table sums to, rather than “more than 45%”; the year-earlier baseline (12–16%, not under 2%), GLM-5’s active parameters (40B), several prices, the DeepSeek IMO/IOI attribution and MiniMax’s licensing are corrected, and unsupported claims about training hardware are removed.

Update, October 1, 2026

For later gateway-usage evidence, see our September 26 report on Chinese models’ share of OpenRouter tokens. That article distinguishes OpenRouter and Vercel traffic from the overall AI market and identifies the dates and limits of each observation. The provider landscape and figures below remain the original Q2 snapshot; they are not a current market-share measurement.

10

Providers covered

~60%

Chinese labs’ OpenRouter token share, early April 2026

2.8x

Xiaomi vs OpenAI OpenRouter token share

21.1%

Xiaomi OpenRouter token share, early April 2026

Key Takeaways

Chinese labs held nearly 60% of OpenRouter tokens: In OpenRouter’s token-share chart for the week to April 3, 2026, Xiaomi, Alibaba (Qwen), MiniMax, Zhipu, DeepSeek and StepFun together held 59.6% of tokens. A year earlier, in April 2025, DeepSeek and Qwen together held 12–16%. This is token share on one gateway, not market share.
Xiaomi had nearly 3x OpenAI’s token share: Xiaomi processed 4.21T tokens on OpenRouter that week, a 21.1% token share, against OpenAI’s 7.5%. MiMo-V2-Pro was the single most-used model on the platform by a wide margin.
Usage and benchmark rank are decoupling: MiMo-V2-Pro, the #1 model by usage, ranked tenth on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index shown on OpenRouter’s leaderboard; the top six were all US models. That suggests developers are choosing on cost per token, coding and long context rather than benchmark leadership.
Ten providers carry almost all Chinese-model usage on OpenRouter: Xiaomi, Alibaba, Zhipu, DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, StepFun, ByteDance, Baidu, and Tencent accounted for almost all Chinese-model tokens on OpenRouter in early April; other Chinese labs registered at most a few billion tokens a week. Some 2024 names have pivoted or stopped releasing: Baichuan now focuses on medical models, and 01.AI has published no new open Yi model since August 2024.
Coding is the wedge that opened the market: MiMo-V2-Pro and Qwen 3.6 Plus together took about 49% of programming-category tokens in OpenRouter’s sampled category chart for the week of March 30. Free or subsidized launch access, strong vendor-reported SWE-bench numbers and 1M-token context windows helped Chinese models win that coding traffic.
Domestic silicon is the enterprise procurement story: Zhipu’s GLM-5 technical report documents inference support for seven Chinese chip platforms, Huawei Ascend among them, and DeepSeek V4 was reported to target Ascend. For Chinese enterprises and state buyers, that hardware independence can matter more than a benchmark point.
Licensing favors open weights outside the flagship tier: GLM-5 ships under MIT, the Qwen 3.5 open-weight models under Apache 2.0, and Kimi K2.5 under a modified MIT license. Xiaomi kept MiMo-V2-Pro API-only, and MiniMax’s M2.7 weights arrived on Hugging Face under a license that requires written permission for commercial use.

Chinese AI labs held nearly 60% of OpenRouter tokens in the week to April 3, 2026, up from 12–16% for DeepSeek and Qwen combined in April 2025. Xiaomi alone had nearly three times OpenAI’s token share. This is the Q2 2026 landscape report: who the ten leading providers are, what they ship, how they price it, and how to evaluate them for production workloads.

The shift is not a benchmark story. Chinese models do not yet lead the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — on the version shown on OpenRouter’s leaderboard on April 3, MiMo-V2-Pro ranked #10 despite being the #1 model by usage. The shift is a cost, availability, and developer-choice story. Free-preview access, 1M token context windows, and per-token list prices from about 2.5x to more than 20x below US frontier models have pulled a large share of OpenRouter’s coding and tool-calling traffic toward Chinese models.

Q2 2026 Landscape at a Glance

Ten providers account for almost all Chinese-model tokens on OpenRouter in early Q2 2026: Xiaomi, Alibaba, Z.ai (Zhipu), DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, StepFun, ByteDance, Baidu, and Tencent. Baichuan, Yi, Xunfei, and KwaiKAT operate as second-tier niche players.

RankProviderWeekly tokensShareFlagship model
1Xiaomi4.21T21.1%MiMo-V2-Pro
2Alibaba (Qwen)2.77T13.9%Qwen 3.6 Plus
3MiniMax1.62T8.1%MiniMax M2.7
4Z.ai (Zhipu)1.12T5.6%GLM-5 / GLM-5 Turbo
5DeepSeek1.11T5.6%DeepSeek V3.2
6StepFun1.07T5.3%Step 3.5 Flash
7Moonshot AIOutside top 10Not shownKimi K2.5
8ByteDanceOutside top 10Not shownSeed 2.0 (Doubao)
9BaiduOutside top 10Not shownERNIE 5.0
10TencentOutside top 10Not shownHY 2.0 (Hunyuan)

Source: OpenRouter’s token share by model author, week beginning March 29, 2026, as displayed on April 3. The week was still in progress: archived snapshots from April 2 and April 3 bracket every token total, and each share is within two points of both readings. OpenRouter’s chart names only its ten largest authors; Moonshot, ByteDance, Baidu and Tencent fall in its “others” group and rank in that order on its trailing-week model leaderboard, where Kimi K2.5 had 0.51T tokens. Baidu, Tencent, and Moonshot concentrate usage on domestic Chinese surfaces and partner ecosystems rather than OpenRouter, so their global ranking understates their home-market presence. OpenRouter notes that token counts come from each provider’s own tokenizer, so a token on one row is not directly comparable with a token on another; treat the shares as a usage signal for Western buyers, not a like-for-like measure.

Update, October 2026: most flagships in this table have been succeeded since this snapshot, among them DeepSeek V4, GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.6, MiMo-V2.5-Pro and MiniMax M3. The figures here remain the early-April snapshot.

Xiaomi: The Phone Company Dominating AI Volume

Xiaomi is the story of this report. A consumer electronics company best known for smartphones and smart-home hardware holds 21.1% of OpenRouter weekly tokens, nearly three times OpenAI’s 7.5%. Xiaomi's AI lab shipped three frontier checkpoints between December 2025 and March 2026 under the MiMo brand, and each variant carved out a clear slot in the pricing curve.

MiMo V2 Pro
March 18, 2026 · Flagship

Over 1T parameters (42B active), 1M context, $1 input / $3 output per million tokens up to 256K ($2 / $6 beyond). The #1 model on OpenRouter at 4.79T weekly tokens and 25.5% of programming-category tokens.

MiMo V2 Omni
March 18, 2026 · Omnimodal

262K context, $0.40 input / $2 output per million tokens. Unified image, video, and audio architecture in a single checkpoint.

MiMo V2 Flash
December 2025 · Ultra-cheap

309B parameters (15B active), MIT-licensed weights, 256K context, $0.09 input / $0.29 output per million tokens on OpenRouter.

For deeper technical coverage, see our MiMo-V2-Pro trillion-parameter release guide and the MiMo-V2-Omni omnimodal release guide.

Why Xiaomi won volume

Three decisions drove the rankings. First, Xiaomi built demand before launch: its anonymous test build, Hunter Alpha, topped OpenRouter’s daily chart for several days and passed 1T tokens, and at launch Xiaomi gave developers a week of free API access through OpenClaw, OpenCode, KiloCode, Blackbox and Cline. MiMo-V2-Pro itself was a paid listing on OpenRouter. Second, the 1M context window matched Qwen 3.6 Plus and the 1M windows of GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6, at a fraction of their price, which suits whole-repo refactors. Third, the pricing gap versus Claude Opus 4.6 is roughly 5x at input and 8x at output, which matters when agent frameworks expand token consumption by an order of magnitude.

Alibaba Qwen: The Scale Leader

Alibaba's Qwen family is the second-ranked provider at 13.9% of OpenRouter tokens and 2.77T weekly tokens, but it is the broadest product line in Chinese AI. Between late January and April 2, 2026, Alibaba shipped at least six named Qwen releases covering coding, reasoning, ultra-cheap inference, omnimodal, and flagship tiers, alongside the open-weight Qwen3.5-397B-A17B in February. Prices below are OpenRouter list prices in early April.

  • Qwen 3.6 Plus (Apr 2, 2026) — Flagship for agentic coding. 1M context by default, 65,536-token maximum output on OpenRouter, reasoning and native function calling. Free during the OpenRouter preview; a paid listing at $0.325 / $1.95 had replaced it by April 10. #2 on OpenRouter with 1.64T weekly tokens.
  • Qwen 3.5-Omni (late March 2026) — Native omnimodal. Qwen’s launch post and technical report give 256K context, speech recognition in 113 languages and dialects and a Thinker-Talker architecture. Offered through Alibaba Cloud’s API, with no open weights.
  • Qwen 3.5 Flash (Feb 24, 2026) — Ultra-cheap high context. 1M tokens, $0.065 input / $0.26 output per million. Top pick for cost-sensitive batch workloads.
  • Qwen 3 Coder Next (early Feb 2026) — Coding-specific. 80B parameters (3B active), 256K context, $0.12 input / $0.75 output per million. Built for coding agents and IDE integrations.
  • Qwen 3 Max Thinking (late Jan 2026; API snapshot dated January 23) — Reasoning variant. 262K context, $0.78 input / $3.90 output per million. Alibaba compared it with GPT-5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro on hard problems.
  • Qwen 3.5 small series (Mar 2, 2026) — On-device. 0.8B to 9B parameters, Apache 2.0. Qwen’s model card puts the 9B variant at 81.7 on GPQA Diamond, above OpenAI’s open-weight gpt-oss-120b at 80.1.

For current flagship detail, see our Qwen 3.6 Plus 1M-context release guide.

Alibaba also sells Qwen to enterprises through Alibaba Cloud International. For Western teams evaluating Chinese models under compliance constraints, Qwen’s Apache 2.0 open weights and Alibaba Cloud’s published SOC 2 report make it a practical starting point.

Zhipu GLM: Enterprise Enablement

Z.ai — the international brand for Zhipu AI — holds 5.6% of OpenRouter tokens and is positioned toward Chinese enterprise deployment. GLM-5 launched February 11, 2026 with 744B total parameters, 40B active per token, a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with 256 experts, 28.5T pre-training tokens and an MIT license. Zhipu’s technical report describes full-stack inference support for seven Chinese chip platforms, Huawei Ascend among them, which makes GLM-5 a natural fit for Chinese state-owned and export-control-sensitive buyers. The report does not say what hardware trained the model.

GLM-5 at a glance
  • 744B total parameters, 40B active, 200K context window, 128K maximum output.
  • 77.8% SWE-bench Verified in Z.ai’s own runs, against 80.9% for Claude Opus 4.5 in the same table.
  • $1.00 input / $3.20 output per million tokens on Z.ai’s API, $1.20 / $4.00 for the faster GLM-5 Turbo variant.
  • MIT licensed weights — among the most permissive in the Chinese frontier tier.
  • GLM-5V-Turbo (April 1, 2026) adds video, image and file input for vision-based coding and agent tasks; Z.ai cites a smaller parameter size but publishes no parameter count.

For the full architectural and benchmark breakdown, see our Zhipu GLM-5 744B MoE release analysis.

Zhipu's positioning is the clearest example of the bifurcation in Chinese AI. While Xiaomi and Alibaba optimize for global developer volume, Zhipu optimizes for Chinese enterprise deployment, domestic-hardware independence, and permissive licensing. For Western self-hosters and researchers, GLM-5’s MIT license sits with the Apache 2.0 Qwen 3.5 open-weight models among the most permissive options; Kimi K2.5 uses a modified MIT license.

DeepSeek: Open-Weight Economics

DeepSeek holds 5.6% of OpenRouter tokens through DeepSeek V3.2, a 685B parameter MoE model released December 1, 2025 with DeepSeek Sparse Attention and DeepSeek’s first integration of thinking into tool use. DeepSeek describes V3.2 as GPT-5-level; its high-compute sibling, V3.2-Speciale, is the model it credits with gold-level results at IMO and IOI 2025 and with surpassing GPT-5. Speciale was served API-only and without tool calls, and these are vendor-run results.

For a detailed walkthrough of the V3.2 release, see our DeepSeek V3.2 and Speciale complete guide.

DeepSeek's strategic value is open-weight economics. V3.2 is available for self-hosting, fine-tuning, and quantization under the MIT license, terms that many Western teams find acceptable. When the production decision comes down to "run the model inside my own cloud region or not," DeepSeek is usually on the shortlist alongside GLM-5 and Kimi K2.5.

Moonshot Kimi: Long-Context Agents

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5 launched January 27, 2026 with 1 trillion total parameters, 32B active per request, a 256K (262,144-token) context window, open weights under a modified MIT license, and an OpenRouter list price of $0.38 input / $1.72 output per million tokens. The standout feature is Agent Swarm: K2.5 can direct up to 100 sub-agents in parallel across up to 1,500 tool calls, which Moonshot says cuts execution time by up to 4.5x. Moonshot’s own results put the agent swarm ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 on BrowseComp and WideSearch; those are vendor-run evaluations.

Kimi K2.5 is also notable as the base model of Cursor Composer 2, which Cursor’s technical report says scored 73.7% on SWE-bench Multilingual in its own harness at the March 19 launch. That makes K2.5 one of the few Chinese models actively embedded in a Western developer tool's production stack, rather than served only as a standalone API.

For the full agent swarm architecture breakdown, see our Kimi K2.5 agent swarm open-source guide.

MiniMax: Self-Evolving Agentic Workflows

MiniMax holds 8.1% of OpenRouter tokens and is the provider most associated with agentic self-evolution. Its M-series shipped four numbered releases in under six months: M2, M2.1, M2.5 (February 12, 2026, 80.2% SWE-Bench Verified in MiniMax’s runs), and M2.7 (March 18, 2026, 56.22% SWE-Pro, about 10B active of 229B total parameters). At $0.30 / $1.20 per million tokens, M2.7’s list price is about 17x below Claude Opus 4.6 on input and 21x on output. MiniMax M2.7 was #4 on OpenRouter’s April 3 leaderboard at 1.34T weekly tokens with +24% week-over-week growth. Its weights went up on Hugging Face just before this report, under a license that bars commercial use without MiniMax’s written permission.

For deeper coverage on the M2.7 release, see our MiniMax M2.7 agentic coding release guide.

MiniMax's positioning is the inverse of Xiaomi's. Rather than competing on raw context, MiniMax leans into what it calls self-evolution: during M2.7’s development the model updated its own memory, built skills for reinforcement-learning experiments and helped refine its own training process, and an internal version optimized a programming scaffold over more than 100 rounds for a 30% gain. That describes how the model was built, not a model that rewrites itself during a task. For agentic workloads, M2.7 is one of the lowest-priced paid models in OpenRouter’s weekly top ten.

StepFun and Second-Tier Providers

Step 3.5 Flash from StepFun (listed on OpenRouter January 29, 2026, with open weights on Hugging Face from February 1) is the surprise performer outside the top four. A 196B MoE with 11B active per token, 256K context, Apache 2.0 weights, and $0.10 input / $0.30 output per million tokens in the paid tier, its free OpenRouter variant ranked #3 on OpenRouter’s overall weekly model leaderboard at 1.38T tokens. StepFun quotes 100–300 tokens per second in typical use, peaking at 350 for single-stream coding; its model card prices decoding on NVIDIA Hopper GPUs but does not name the training hardware.

Below StepFun, a handful of second-tier providers serve specific niches:

  • ByteDance Seed 2.0 (Doubao) — Doubao remained mainland China’s top consumer AI app in December 2025, according to an industry report cited by the South China Morning Post. ByteDance benchmarks the Seed 2.0 Pro variant, released in February, against GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro in its own evaluations, at a fraction of GPT-5.2’s price. Seed 2.0 Lite and Mini extend the family into cheaper tiers ($0.10-$0.25 per million input on OpenRouter).
  • Baidu ERNIE 5.0 — 2.4T-parameter multimodal flagship, launched January 22, 2026 according to the South China Morning Post; Baidu has not said which chips trained it. The same report put monthly active users of Baidu’s AI assistant at 200 million.
  • KwaiKAT KAT-Coder-Pro V2 — Coding-specific Kuaishou model, listed on OpenRouter on March 27, 2026. 256K context, $0.30 / $1.20 per million, aimed at enterprise software engineering.
  • Baichuan and Yi — Baichuan’s recent open releases are medical models (Baichuan-M3-235B, January 2026); 01.AI has published no new open Yi model since August 2024. Neither has a meaningful OpenRouter presence.
  • Xunfei (iFlytek) — Spark series, strong on speech, education, and public-sector workflows. Limited global-market ranking.
  • Tencent HY 2.0 (Hunyuan) — Tencent’s flagship language model at the time, released in December 2025 according to IT Home and TechNode, and offered through Tencent Cloud and the Yuanbao app. Minimal OpenRouter footprint: only an older open-weight Hunyuan-A13B was listed.

Note that NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Super 120B (released March 11, 2026, 60.47% on SWE-Bench Verified with OpenHands in NVIDIA’s model card, open weights under the NVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License, up to 1M context and 262K as served on OpenRouter) often appears in "Chinese AI" conversations because of its pricing profile, but it is an NVIDIA model trained and served outside China. Do not count it toward Chinese token share.

Pricing Comparison Matrix

The table below covers thirteen flagship and volume models from eight of the ten providers, sorted by provider; Baidu and Tencent had no comparable flagship listing on OpenRouter. Figures are OpenRouter list prices and context lengths from OpenRouter’s model catalog as archived on April 3, 2026, except GLM-5, shown at Z.ai’s own API price and 200K context because OpenRouter’s default GLM-5 listing that day was capped at 80K. MiMo V2 Pro’s price applies up to 256K of context; Xiaomi charges $2 / $6 from 256K to 1M.

ProviderModelInput $/1MOutput $/1MContext
XiaomiMiMo V2 Pro$1.00$3.001.05M
XiaomiMiMo V2 Flash$0.09$0.29262K
AlibabaQwen 3.6 PlusFree preview; $0.325 by April 10Free preview; $1.95 by April 101M
AlibabaQwen 3.5 Flash$0.065$0.261M
AlibabaQwen 3 Max Thinking$0.78$3.90262K
Z.ai (Zhipu)GLM-5$1.00$3.20200K
Z.ai (Zhipu)GLM-5 Turbo$1.20$4.00203K
DeepSeekDeepSeek V3.2$0.26$0.38164K
MoonshotKimi K2.5$0.38$1.72262K
MiniMaxMiniMax M2.7$0.30$1.20205K
MiniMaxMiniMax M2.5$0.12$0.99197K
StepFunStep 3.5 Flash$0.10$0.30262K
ByteDanceSeed 2.0 Lite$0.25$2.00262K

For reference, OpenAI GPT-5.4 sits at $2.50 / $15.00 with 1.05M context, Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $3.00 / $15.00 with 1M, and Claude Opus 4.6 at $5.00 / $25.00 with 1M. Against those anchors, the Chinese flagship MiMo-V2-Pro undercuts US pricing by roughly 2.5-5x at input and 5-8x at output on comparable context lengths.

Capability Comparison Matrix

The capability matrix below summarizes flagship models across five workloads: coding, reasoning, tool use, multimodal inputs, and multilingual handling. The labels are our qualitative reading of the provider sections above, not independent test results; where a cell gives a figure, it is the vendor-reported benchmark or OpenRouter usage share cited there.

ModelCodingReasoningTool useMultimodalMultilingual
MiMo V2 Pro (Xiaomi)Strong (25.5% programming share)Solid#1 OpenRouter tool callsText onlyChinese + English
MiMo V2 Omni (Xiaomi)SolidSolidStrongImage + video + audioChinese + English
Qwen 3.6 Plus (Alibaba)Strong (23.5% programming share)Reasoning modelNative function callingText, image, video inputBroad
Qwen 3.5-Omni (Alibaba)SolidSolidStrongFull omnimodal113 languages speech
GLM-5 (Zhipu)77.8% SWE-VerifiedStrongSolidGLM-5V-Turbo variantChinese + English
DeepSeek V3.2StrongGPT-5 level (Speciale: IMO/IOI gold)Thinking-in-Tool-UseText onlyChinese + English
Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot)Cursor Composer 2 baseStrong100-agent swarmMultimodal MoEChinese + English
MiniMax M2.756.22% SWE-ProStrongStrongText primaryChinese + English
Step 3.5 Flash (StepFun)SolidSolidSolidText primaryChinese + English
ERNIE 5.0 (Baidu)SolidStrongBaidu search-nativeFull omnimodalChinese + limited English

Three patterns stand out. First, the coding leaders are MiMo-V2-Pro and Qwen 3.6 Plus — combined they took roughly 49% of programming-category tokens in OpenRouter’s sampled category chart for the week of March 30. Second, Qwen 3.5-Omni and ERNIE 5.0 are the most genuinely omnimodal flagships, with MiMo-V2-Omni close behind. Third, none of the benchmarks cited here measures English-language tone, so test it on your own prompts before a consumer-facing deployment aimed at US audiences.

Enterprise Readiness and Export Controls

Pricing and capability tell only part of the procurement story. The enterprise-readiness matrix below covers compliance posture, US availability, primary hosting geography, and hardware stack. These are the dimensions that typically decide whether a model passes internal review at a US or EU-based buyer.

ProviderSOC 2GDPR postureUS API accessPrimary geographyHardware
XiaomiNot publishedLimitedDirect + OpenRouterChinaNot disclosed
AlibabaAlibaba Cloud SOC 2EU regions availableDirect + OpenRouterChina + internationalNot disclosed
Z.ai (Zhipu)Not publishedSelf-host pathDirect + OpenRouter + self-hostChinaInference on Ascend and six other Chinese chips
DeepSeekNot publishedSelf-host pathDirect + OpenRouter + self-hostChinaNVIDIA H800 (V3 base)
MoonshotNot publishedSelf-host pathDirect + OpenRouter + self-hostChinaNot disclosed
MiniMaxNot publishedLimitedDirect + OpenRouterChinaNot disclosed
StepFunNot publishedSelf-host pathOpenRouter + self-hostChinaNot disclosed
ByteDanceBytePlus SOC 2Via BytePlus (international)Direct + OpenRouterChina + internationalNot disclosed
BaiduDomestic certsLimitedBaidu AI CloudChinaNot disclosed
TencentTencent Cloud SOC 2EU tenants availableTencent CloudChina + internationalNot disclosed
Compliance-first buyers

For regulated industries, the safer path is self-hosting open-weight models (GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, Qwen 3.5 small series) inside your own cloud region with documented data processing controls, rather than hitting Chinese-hosted APIs directly.

Hardware independence

Models with documented support for Chinese accelerators (GLM-5 on Huawei Ascend and six other domestic chips; DeepSeek V4 was reported to target Ascend) are the procurement story for Chinese state-owned buyers under US export controls. For Western buyers, the choice is neutral to slightly negative given the smaller tooling ecosystem.

Conclusion: The Q2 2026 Playbook

Chinese labs reached nearly 60% of OpenRouter tokens in early April as the leading providers converged on a consistent playbook: ship flagship models with large context windows, price aggressively below US frontier, offer free or subsidized launch access through AI coding tools, and keep a clear open-weight path for enterprise self-hosting. Xiaomi's 21.1% token share is the most dramatic data point, but the pattern runs across Alibaba, Zhipu, MiniMax, DeepSeek, and StepFun.

The actionable takeaway for Western buyers is narrower than the headlines suggest. Chinese flagship models are cheaper on list price and competitive on vendor-reported coding benchmarks and long context. They lag on published compliance posture, and English-language tone and enterprise tooling are worth testing before adoption. The sensible strategy in most production stacks is a multi-model architecture — US frontier for customer-facing English output and compliance-sensitive workflows, Chinese models for internal coding, batch processing, and cost-sensitive agent workloads, all routed through a cost-aware orchestration layer.

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Sources

Usage figures are OpenRouter token shares, not market shares. Benchmark scores are vendor-reported unless stated otherwise. Also named in the text without a link: Alibaba’s Qwen 3.6 Plus press release (April 2, 2026), ByteDance’s Seed 2.0 announcement, Kuaishou’s KwaiKAT listing, The Information’s pre-launch report on DeepSeek V4 and Huawei Ascend (as relayed by TrendForce), Reuters on Huawei’s V4 compatibility statement (April 24, 2026), IT Home and TechNode on Tencent HY 2.0 (December 2025), and the South China Morning Post on ERNIE 5.0 (January 22, 2026) and on Doubao (December 24, 2025).

Usage and benchmark rank

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