For the first time, the five most-used models on OpenRouter are all Chinese
OpenRouter's July ranking shows Chinese-built models sweeping the top five by token volume! Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5 first at roughly 10.5 trillion tokens a week (up ~12% on the month), ahead of DeepSeek, MiniMax, Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot's Kimi. Chinese-origin models currently hold more than 60% of all traffic the router handles.
What it actually means
This is usage, is what people are actually running with their own money and it's the clearest signal yet that the default has moved. For a month this Digest argued about which model to rent; the market has quietly answered on cost. Now hold it next to the provenance point from last week: 'most-used' and 'safe to depend on' are not the same sentence. Now it’s to notice that the cheap, capable option is currently the Chinese one by default, but try it on one real workload, measure whether the quality actually holds, but keep a Western model one config change away. The risk here was never quality. Having just said that, OpenAI has just cut its model costs!
The market voted with its own money, and it voted Chinese on cost and power to a degree. The only open question left is whether you'll still be allowed to use what you picked.
60%+of OpenRouter traffic now runs on Chinese-origin models
Source: Dataconomy · Thursday 30 July 2026