Chinese Open-Source AI Models Attract Global Interest But Revenues Go to Third Parties
According to Epoch AI research, while Chinese open-source AI developers like DeepSeek and Z.ai are becoming globally widespread, the majority of the revenue generated goes to third-party providers instead of their creators.
While China-based open-weight artificial intelligence models have achieved a high adoption rate worldwide, a new study shows that a significant portion of the revenue generated by these models flows into the coffers of third-party providers rather than the developer companies.
Global Adoption and Competition
Developers such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI make model weights available for free download, allowing other companies to run these models on their own servers and modify them independently.
Disadvantages in Revenue Sharing
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek faced data showing it captured only 8 percent of estimated customer spending on its models accessed through the third-party aggregator OpenRouter.
The token share of Beijing-based Z.ai's GLM-5.3 Flash on OpenRouter experienced a significant drop shortly after, with numerous third-party providers offering access at lower rates.