Six of the ten most-used models on OpenRouter are now Chinese

Five days ago the point here was that an open model beating a frontier lab on agent work was a vendor's claim, and should be read as one. Be honest about what the number is: OpenRouter is not the market. It skews towards people shopping on price, it can't see traffic going straight to a lab's own API, and tokens aren't preference; a model inflates its own score. The top slot being an anonymous stealth model, almost certainly free, tells you how much of this is experimentation. Among the builders who route by price rather than by brand, the default has quietly inverted. Chinese open weights are no longer the fallback you consider after the pilot; they're the thing already carrying the traffic. If you've never priced one of your real workloads against them, you could become the unusual one. Two things to keep separate as you look, because plenty of teams are about to conflate them: running open weights on hardware you control, and calling a Chinese-hosted API. Same model, entirely different risk conversation. Do the first before you argue about the second. The detail worth sitting with is Xiaomi at number three. A phone manufacturer is putting more tokens through this router than Google's Flash model. The list of who gets to supply you is longer than your procurement policy thinks.